The peculiarities of the low-energy ion scattering by polycrystal targets

In the present work, experimental and computer simulation studies of low-energy (E-0 = 80-500 eV) Cs+ ions scattering on Ta, W, Re target surfaces and K+ ions scattering on Ti, V, Cr target surfaces have been performed for more accurate definition of mechanism of scattering, with a purpose of evaluation of an opportunity of use of slow ions scattering as a tool of surface layers analysis. The choice of the targets was based on the fact that the ratios of atomic masses of target atoms and ions mu = m(2)/m(1) were almost the same for all cases considered and greater than 1 (direct mass ratio) however, the difference of binding energies of target atoms in the cases of Cs+ and K+ scattering was almost twice as much. It has been noticed that the dependencies of the relative energy retained by scattering ions at the maximum of energy distribution versus the initial energy E-m/E-0 (E-0) have a similar shape in all cases. The relative energy retained by scattering ions increases while the initial energy of incidence ions decreases. The curves are placed above each other relative to the binding energies of target atoms, to show what this says about the influence of binding energy on a process of scattering of low-energy ions. The correlation between value of energy change maintained by an ion for different values of E0 in the case of scattering by targets with different masses of atoms and its binding energies is experimentally established. The contrary behavior of the E-m/E-0 (E-0) dependencies concerning the target atom binding energy quantity E-b for cases with direct (mu > 1) and inverse (mu < 1) mass ratio of colliding particles is established. The comparison of experimental energy distributions with calculated histograms shows that the binary collision approximation cannot elucidate the abnormally great shift in the maxima of relative energy distributions towards greater energy retained by scattering ions. (c) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.