INELASTIC EFFECTS CLOSE TO THE ROUGHENING TRANSITION OF AG(110)

In this paper we present a preliminary study of the effects of surface vibrations on determining the Ag(110) roughening temperature. Data were collected along the <001> direction and in the out-of-phase condition by means of time-of-flight resolved He atom scattering. Careful analysis of the experiments! results in the high sample temperature range, similar to 900 K, shows the strong dependence of the roughening temperature on the time window used to construct the angular profiles from the measured spectra. The present study points out that only an approximate and lower limit for the transition temperature can be established with no energy selection of the scattered intensity.