Activity 3: Adsorbates and the single scattering approach

Oxygen on Rh(001)

In a paper published in 1998, T. Gerber et al. used the quite high backscattering factor of Rhodium atoms to probe the distance of Oxygen atoms adsorbed on a Rhodium surface. Some electrons coming from Oxygen atoms are ejected toward the Rhodium surface. They are then backscattered and interfere with the direct signal comming from Oxygen atoms (see the figure below). They demonstrated both experimentally and numerically with a sinle scattering computation that this lead to a very accurate probe of adsorbed species that can be sensitive to bond length changes of the order of