Optical surface absorption by surface-adsorbate charge-transfer excitations

Metal-insulator-silver junctions are well suited to measure genuine surface optical excitations, especially electronic transitions to the lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals (LUMO) of adsorbates on silver. This is demonstrated by the increase of internal photoemission current after monolayer coverage with C₂H₄ (which has π^*-LUMO) by a factor of about 2.5, but a missing change in the case of C₂H₆ (which has no π^*-LUMO ). Received: 26 November 1999 / Published online: 8 March 2000