Ion induced electron emission

Since decades it is known, that ions hitting a solid surface may cause emission of electrons from the sample. One distinguishes two different kinds: kinetic emission (KE) which is related to the projectile's kinetic energy and potential emission (PE), which is an effect purely driven by the potential energy of the incident particle. For highly charged ions (HCI) the potential energy becomes very large and therefore can lead to a very large number of emitted electrons.

We use two completely different instruments for the investigation of emitted electrons: An Electron statistics detector, which counts the number of emitted electrons and works in the regime of single projectile hits. Alternatively we use a current method for the total electron yield measurements working at much higher intensities.

Back to Ion-surface-interaction