| Popis: |
Work on theories of gas–surface interactions received a strong impetus from advances in experimental physics in the early part of the last century, notably from the work of Stern and coworkers on verifying the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution and the work of Roberts in measuring the energy accommodation coefficient. Much of the subsequent experimental work has involved gases made up of heavy mass atoms with large incident energies and relatively high surface temperatures, which are the conditions under which the scattering can be described with classical physics. In this paper a straightforward theory of classical gas–surface scattering is considered and applied to the analysis of a wide variety of experiments. The theory depends on limited information about the nature of the actual particle–surface interaction potential but does correctly account for the necessary laws of conservation of energy and momentum. Analysis of well-controlled experiments in the classical regime involving rare gases scattering from liquid, metal, and insulator surfaces is shown to yield a great deal of information about the atom–surface interaction and also reveals limitations on what such experiments are capable of revealing about the collision process. |
