LEED and DLEED as modern tools for quantitative surface structure determination

Abstract

The last decade has seen remarkable new developments in the field of low energy electron diffraction (LEED) which are reviewed in the present paper. The arrival of sophisticated and fast techniques for the measurement of diffraction intensities in the early 1980s was a challenge to theory. Its answer was the development of tensor LEED (TLEED) in 1985. It allows the fast calculation of intensities for structures not too far from a certain reference. This made quantitative surface structure analysis approach new frontiers both with respect to structural complexity and-with the help of the routine use of reliability factors-to precision. Simultaneously, the new experimental techniques allowed access to two-dimensional intensity maps, i.e. the measurement of diffuse intensity distributions. Theory could be modified to calculate such distributions and so gave birth to the diffuse LEED technique (DLEED) which allows the retrieval of the local structure in case of disordered adsorption. The basics and the development of both TLEED and DLEED is reviewed. TLEED is the basis for direct methods and is used in effective search procedures for surface structures structurally close to a certain reference. It can also be used to simulate the substitution of surface atoms by different chemical species as well as to account for surface vibrations. In addition to carrying the information about the local structure, DLEED patterns very recently could be successfully interpreted in a holographic sense yielding real space images directly.