Mechanism for electron emission and exciton formation during collisions of neutral hydrogens with a LiF(001) surface

Abstract

In this article we propose an unexplored mechanism to understand the physics underlying the electron emission and exciton formation occurring during grazing impact of neutral hydrogen atoms on LiF(100) surfaces. Instead of adopting the traditional point of view considering the negative ion formation as the precursor of the processes, we investigate the formation of excited hydrogen H (n =2 ) as a catalyzer to produce excitons and electrons. We base our proposal on ab initio calculations that compare quite well with experiments for impact energies larger than 4 keV.