Inelastic helium scattering studies of the vibrational spectroscopy and dynamics of ordered Ar, Kr, and Xe multilayers physisorbed on Ag(111)

Abstract

This is the second of three papers discussing our studies of overlayers of Ar, Kr, and Xe physisorbed on Ag(111). All of these rare gases form ordered structures, which are azimuthally aligned but translationally incommensurate with the Ag substrate. In this paper, we discuss experiments in which we utilized the angle resolved time of flight of inelastically scattered 18 MeV He atoms to examine the surface dynamics of multilayer rare gas films along the Γ̄–M̄ direction. This was done on a layer-by-layer basis for 2, 3, and ≥20 layers for each of the rare gases. Unlike the monolayers, the vibrational modes observed for the multilayers show dispersion across the surface Brillouin zone, the amount of dispersion increasing with the number of adsorbed layers. These results reveal in detail how the surface dynamical properties of a thin film evolve towards those of a thick crystal as a function of increasing dimension. Lattice dynamics calculations, which utilize realistic gas phase pair potentials, reproduce the experimentally observed phonon dispersion relations quite well. We also examine the inelastic scattering probabilities and linewidths of the transitions. One of the more notable results is that the inelastic scattering probabilities vary by at most a factor of 2–3 across the entire surface Brillouin zone. Isothermal desorption measurements for the Xe overlayers are also discussed. Like the monolayer, the bilayer and trilayer exhibit nearly zeroth order desorption until ∼90% of the top layer has desorbed, where the desorption kinetics become first order.