Scattering of helium atoms from rare-gas-plated graphite

Enhanced creation of dispersive monolayer phonons in XePt(111) by inelastic helium atom scattering at low energies

Conditions likely to lead to enhanced inelastic atomic scattering that creates shear horizontal (SH) and longitudinal acoustic (LA) monolayer phonons are identified, specifically examining the inelastic scattering of (4)He atoms by a monolayer solid of XePt(111) at incident energies of 2-25 meV. There is strong inelastic scattering for both dispersive phonon branches (SH and LA) of the monolayer at incident energies below 8 meV. Several improvements enable more complete wave packet calculations of the inelastic scattering than in previous work. Long propagation times are made feasible by adding an absorbing potential at large distance. The times now extend to beyond 100 ps and enable a clarification of processes involving transient trapping of the He atoms. The wave packet is made more monochromatic by significantly increasing the spatial width of the initial Gaussian shape. The narrower energy distribution in the incident beam then enables a demonstration of strong energy dependence of the scattering over a scale of less than 0.3 meV.

New calculational technique for multilayer stacks

We introduce a new calculational technique for multilayer stacks that avoids numerical instability problems inherent in the well-known characteristic matrix technique when evanescent waves are present. The new technique is based on R matrix propagation algorithms in which the impedance of the multilayer rather than the admittance is propagated. The relation between the new R matrix and the characteristic matrix techniques is given as well as the criteria for choosing which technique to employ in a given problem. Several simple examples are given to illustrate how the R matrix propagation technique is implemented.