Angular distribution of photoemission from amorphous and polycrystalline solids

Abstract

A convenient experimental method for determining the relative angular distribution of photoemission from solid materials has been proposed. Experiments were simultaneously simulated with the Monte Carlo model describing realistic photoelectron transport in solids. It has been proved that a major part of the observed discrepancy between the angular distribution of photoemission from atoms and from solids can be ascribed to elastic photoelectron scattering. The formalism of x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS) can be easily extended to account for the observed effects by introducing the effective asymmetry paramter ${\mathrm{\beta }}_{\mathit{e}\mathit{f}\mathit{f}}$. This parameter well describes the decrease in anisotropy of photoemission, thus improving the reliability of the mathematical formalism of XPS, and consequently, the accuracy of quantitative analysis.