Electronic correlation effects on the neutralization of Ga+ scattered by a gold surface

Abstract

The monotonous increasing with temperature behavior of the neutralization of Ga+ scattered by a gold surface plus the nonmagnetic character of the ion induced to disregard the important electronic correlation effects. In this work, we show that contrary to this assumption, the electron-electron interaction in the Ga site is crucial for describing the experimental results. We extend the formalism previously used in the Sr+/Au system to include more than one valence orbital in the projectile, which is the case of Ga+, where the neutralization occurs to a p-type shell. We consider the six possible orbital-spin neutral configurations in a correlated way within the Anderson model. The comparison with the results obtained from a noninteracting electron model allows one to infer how important the many-body effects in the charge exchange between Ga+ and the gold surface are. We also found that the proximity of the projectile one-electron energy levels to the substrate Fermi level determines the influence of electronic correlation effects on the neutral fraction and its temperature and velocity dependences.