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Surf. Sci. Lett. 364 (1996) pp. L595-L599
Ab-initio results for the adiabatic atom-surface interaction for helium and neon on a simple metal
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica della materia-Dipartimento di Fisica, Universita di Milano, Via Celoria 16, 20133 Milano, Italy
School of Physics, University of Bath, BA2 7AY, United Kingdom
Abstract
We report an ab-initio calculation of the adiabatic electronic
properties of He and Ne atoms interacting with a jellium
(Al-like)
surface, in the framework of the embedding method and using density
functional theory in the local density approximation.
In particular, attention is focused on the repulsive
atom--surface potential.
For incident atoms with initial kinetic energies in the typical
experimental range (up to about 200 meV), it is shown that Ne gets
closer to the metal than He.
This is in agreement with the experimental observation of a greater
sensitivity to the surface electronic structure of Ne than of He,
but in contrast with results obtained by simply applying the
effective medium theory to the Ne/metal system.