Spin-dependent surface barrier from very-low-energy electron diffraction fine structures: A feasibility study

Abstract

The surface barrier is a key issue for understanding and describing the results of surface-sensitive electron spectroscopies, such as photoemission and inverse photoemission. We present a feasibility study showing that the shape of the surface barrier can be derived from very-low-energy electron diffraction (VLEED) fine-structure measurements. In particular, we focus on the spin dependence of the barrier probed by a spin-polarized experiment. We show model calculations of spin-dependent fine structures for specific ferromagnetic surfaces, where spin-dependent barrier models were successfully employed to describe spectroscopic results. We come to the conclusion that spin-polarized VLEED experiments with state-of-the-art energy and angular resolution are able to reveal details of the spin-dependent shape of the surface barrier.