Lifetimes of Shockley electrons and holes at the Cu(111) surface

Abstract

A theoretical many-body analysis is presented of the electron-electron inelastic lifetimes of Shockley electrons and holes at the (111) surface of Cu. For a description of the decay of Shockley states both below and above the Fermi level, single-particle wave functions have been obtained by solving the Schrödinger equation with the use of an approximate one-dimensional pseudopotential fitted to reproduce the correct bulk energy bands and surface-state dispersion. A comparison with previous calculations and experiment indicates that inelastic lifetimes are very sensitive to the actual shape of the surface-state single-particle orbitals beyond the $\bar{\Gamma }$ (${\mathbf{k}}_{\parallel }=0$) point, which controls the coupling between the Shockley electrons and holes.

4 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. B

References in corpus (5)

• Role of bulk and surface phonons in the decay of metal surface states
• Quantum Coherence of Image-Potential States
• Role of occupied d bands in the dynamics of excited electrons and holes in Ag
• Phase coherence length and quantum interference patterns at step edges
• Recent Progress in the Computational Many-Body Theory of Metal Surfaces

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Theory of surface plasmons and surface-plasmon polaritons
• Conventional and Acoustic Surface Plasmons on Noble Metal Surfaces: A Time-dependent Density Functional Theory Study
• Theoretical analysis of STM-derived lifetimes of excitations in the Shockley surface state band of Ag(111)
• Lifetimes of electrons in the Shockley surface state band of Ag(111)
• Self-energy and lifetime of Shockley and image states on Cu(100) and Cu(111): Beyond the GW approximation of many-body theory
• Theory of inelastic lifetimes of surface-state electrons and holes at metal surfaces