HOT-ELECTRON TRANSPORT-PROPERTIES OF RARE-GAS SOLIDS DERIVED FROM LOW-ENERGY ELECTRON TRANSMISSION EXPERIMENTS

The results of the analysis of available experimental low-energy electron transmission (LEET) data on thin solid rare-gas films deposited on a metal substrate are presented. The analysis is carried out on the basis of a most recent semiclassical electron transport model. Transport parameters inferred from the experiments are: (i) the entrance probability of the incident electrons at the vacuum-film interface; (ii) the total (elastic and inelastic) electron scattering mean free path (MFP); and (iii) the probability of inelastic scattering in the bulk of the studied materials (namely solid argon, krypton, and xenon). Comparisons made with recent energy band-structure calculations reveal that both the entrance probability and the inverse of the total MFP (or the total scattering frequency per unit pathlength) are highly correlated with the conduction-band density of states of these materials. A comparison of two sets of experimental data obtained for solid argon under different conditions of preparation of the metallic surface illustrates the reliability of our analysis to infer electron transport parameters from LEET experiments.