ON THE MEASUREMENT OF STATISTICS FOR PARTICLE-INDUCED ELECTRON-EMISSION FROM A CLEAN METAL-SURFACE

Statistics of electron emission from clean gold under impact of slow (< 1 au) heavy particles have been measured by means of a surface barrier detector for collecting the ejected and subsequently accelerated electrons. Backscattering of these electrons from the detector surface causes a characteristic background between individual peaks of the pulse-height spectra, which must quantitatively be taken into account before evaluation of the measured statistics. From the latter, among other pieces of information the mean electron emission yield gamma can be calculated. For gamma values below and of the order of unity such determined emission statistics deviate clearly from a Poisson distribution, the reason of which is finally discussed.