Photon emission from sputtered atoms — The observation of apparent local thermodynamic equilibrium in the excitation

We develop, here, our previous LEED Kikuchi pattern theory in order to include the plamion excitation. Therefore, we assume that the intensity of electrons which have suffered plasmon excitations is given by a Poisson distribution. The theory is applied to calculate the contrast change of the aluminium (111) Kikuchi band due to the plasmon excitation, and the calculated values show a good agreement with our experiment. They confirm especially that the contrast due to the one plasmon excitation is larger than the contrast due to phonon excitation only.