Electron transmission through a dirty surface in low-energy spectroscopy experiments

Abstract

We discuss the transmission of electrons through a dirty surface, a situation sometimes encountered in low-energy electron spectroscopies, and specifically address the proposal that the transmission probability is proportional to the density of electronic states of the underlying film divided by the incident electron velocity (in vacuum). We postulate an ideal diffusive surface and calculate the transmission for different film electronic band structures. We find that the characteristic injection peak agrees with some experimental situations encountered with dirty surfaces. We also find that, although there is no strict quantitative justification for the density-of-states hypothesis, there are qualitative arguments favoring such a correlation in the case of films with fair velocity-matching conditions with vacuum as for rare-gas solids.