Inversion of atom diffraction intensities for surface structural determination

Atom diffraction from surfaces has proved to be a very useful method for structural studies on surfaces, particularly for incommensurate layers and hydrogen adlayers which are not easily analyzed with LEED. We have developed a rapid method to obtain the surface corrugation function directly from the measured intensities within the hard wall model. This avoids a tedious search in parameter space to determine surface structures and is valid for surfaces whose corrugation amplitudes are below the Rayleigh limit. We will discuss the method and its sensitivity to experimental errors in determining the diffraction intensities as well as its applicability when only a fraction of the allowed diffraction beams are experimentally accessible.