Theoretical study of swift molecular ions specularly reflected from solid surfaces under glancing angle of incidence

Abstract

We develop a theoretical model to study grazing scattering of fast diatomic molecular ions from a solid surface, based on the dielectric response formalism within the specular reflection model, where the plasmon pole approximation for dielectric function is employed to describe the single-particle and the collective excitations of the electron gas at the surface. Evolution of the bound-electron densities at the constituent ions of a molecule in the course of scattering is described by an approach similar to recent implementation of the Brandt–Kitagawa model for single-ion surface grazing scattering. We solve numerically the equations of motion for the constituent ions and obtain the ion scattering trajectories in the presence of Coulomb explosion modified by the surface wake potential, for the initial molecular-axis orientations in either random directions or along the beam. Vicinage effect on the total energy loss is discussed on the basis of analyzing the position-dependent stopping powers of individual ions and the interferences in the electron excitations of the substrate.