KINETIC ELECTRON-EMISSION FROM SOLIDS INDUCED BY SLOW PARTICLES

Recent experiments on electron emission from metals induced by impact of slow ions reveal long tails of the electron distribution at high energies. The impact energies are below the deep level excitation threshold and thus mostly valence electrons seem to contribute to the emission. In an attempt to explain this experimental observation the energy spectra of electronic excitations have been calculated in the local representation of valence electrons. The effect of deep inner shells has been accounted for by orthogonalizing the valence wave functions to the core wave functions. The admixture leads to excitations of electrons far above the classical limit of 2m-upsilon-upsilon-F where upsilon is the velocity of the moving particle, m is the electron mass and upsilon-F is the electron velocity at the Fermi level.