Recent Advances in Field Electron Microscopy of Metals

Publisher Summary The chapter explains how field electron microscopy has established itself as a powerful tool for elucidating a variety of phenomena occurring at metal and semiconductor surfaces. The quasielectron momentum components perpendicular to the tunneling direction are conserved during electron tunneling through a finite potential barrier. The chapter talks about the many-body approach that involves the thermodynamic Green's function method to treat field emission from superconductors, and nonideal metals in which electrons collide with phonons, impurities, and lattice imperfections. The method was also applied to the effect of a finite analyzer resolution. The atomic potential was represented both by a square well with an attractive core parameterized by its depth and width, and by a repulsive delta function potential that was equivalent to orthogonalization of the tunneling electron wavefunction to the occupied, tightly bound adsorbate electron orbitals. Plausible forms for the pseudopotential for both metallic and neutral adsorbates were suggested. The chapter also states that a Stark splitting of an electron–phonon transition can be envisioned in the case of degenerate vibrational, rotational, or bending modes.