Theoretical studies of spin-polarized DLEED rotation curves: disordered CO overlayer on Pt(111)

Abstract

We present a series of theoretical spin-polarized diffuse low-energy electron diffraction studies which explore the information that may be extracted from the rotation curves. At selected beam energies, we report calculations of the angular variations of the relativistic incoherent intensity along with the spin–orbit induced incoherent scattering asymmetry. Both the polar angle of incidence and the azimuthal angle of incidence of a polarized beam are scanned consecutively. Through use of relativistic multiple scattering theory of diffuse LEED, we study the particular advantages of using DSPLEED rotation curves for the disorder surface structure analysis. We explore the CO/Pt(111) system, focusing on the sensitivity of features in the rotation curves to some aspects of adsorbate/substrate geometry. For example, the incoherent asymmetry parameters prove to be very sensitive to the adsorbate/substrate spacing.