Auger correlation

This is illustrated in Eig. 2.30 [2.167]. The surface was that of a fractured compact of SiC to which horon and carhon had been added to aid the sintering process. The aim of the analysis was to establish the uniformity of distribution of the additives and the presence or absence of impurities. The Auger maps show not only very non-uniform distribution of boron (Eig. 2.30a) but also strong correlation of boron with sodium (Eig. 2.30c), and weaker correlation of boron with potassium (Eig. 2.30b). Point analyses for points A and B marked on the images reveal the presence of sulfur and cal-... 

Recently, other authors when studying the activation of hydrogen by nickel and nickel-copper catalysts in the hydrogen-deuterium exchange reaction concentrated for example only on the role of nickel in these alloys (56) or on a correlation between the true nickel concentration in the surface layer of an alloy, as stated by the Auger electron spectroscopy, and the catalytic activity (57). 

The significance of the values calculated for the effective polarizability was first established with physical data, among them relaxation energies derived from a combination of X-ray photoelectron and Auger spectroscopy, as well as N-ls ESCA data53, 54). From our point of view, however, the most important applications of effective polarizability are to be found in correlating chemical reactivity data. Thus, the proton affinity (PA) of 49 unsubstituted alkylamines comprising primary, secondary and tertiary amines of a variety of skeletal types correlate directly with effective polarizability values (Fig. 22). 

Figure 5. Correlation of electrochemical vs. Auger determination of Cu coverage. The electrochemical measurements were taken from the area under the Cu stripping peaks. (Data from ref. 16.)...

Correlation effects in Auger spectra may be classified similarly to those in the case of photoelectron spectra. Strong correlation effects occur in... 

Effective nuclear charge grows with increase of ionization and excitation of an atom, therefore, the fluorescence yield in ions and, to a less extent, in excited atoms, tends to increase. Radiative and Auger linewidths, as well as fluorescence yields, depend on relativistic and correlation effects to less extent in comparison with the probabilities of separate transitions, because in sums the individual corrections partly compensate each other. Therefore, calculations of radiative widths in the Hartree-Fock-Pauli approach lead to reasonably accurate results. 

Interatomic Coulombic decay (ICD) is an electronic decay process that is particularly important for those inner-shell or inner-subshell vacancies that are not energetic enough to give rise to Auger decay. Typical examples include inner-valence-ionized states of rare gas atoms. In isolated systems, such vacancy states are bound to decay radiatively on the nanosecond timescale. A rather different scenario is realized whenever such a low-energy inner-shell-ionized species is let to interact with an environment, for example, in a cluster. In such a case, the existence of the doubly ionized states with positive charges residing on two different cluster units leads to an interatomic (or intermolecular) decay process in which the recombination part of the two-electron transition takes part on one unit, whereas the ionization occurs on another one. ICD [73-75] is mediated by electronic correlation between two atoms (or molecules). In clusters of various sizes and compositions, ICD occurs on the timescale from hundreds of femtoseconds [18] down to several femtoseconds [76-79]. 

The different emission products which are possible after photoionization with free atoms lead to different experimental methods being used for example, electron spectrometry, fluorescence spectrometry, ion spectrometry and combinations of these methods are used in coincidence measurements. Here only electron spectrometry will be considered. (See Section 6.2 for some reference data relevant to electron spectrometry.) Its importance stems from the rich structure of electron spectra observed for photoprocesses in the outermost shells of atoms which is due to strong electron correlation effects, including the dominance of non-radiative decay paths. (For deep inner-shell ionizations, radiative decay dominates (see Section 2.3).) In addition, the kinetic energy of the emitted electrons allows the selection of a specific photoprocess or subsequent Auger or autoionizing transition for study. 

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