Abstract More than a century after the discovery of the electron, there are still fundamental, yet unresolved, questions concerning the generation-ejection mechanism of the ubiquitous Secondary Electrons (SEs) from a solid surface. Broadness of the field of application for these SEs makes it desirable to be able to control this phenomenon, which requires the understanding of the elementary physical mechanism leading to their generation and emission. This paper reports on the dissection of such a tangled process operated by the help of spectroscopic tools of increasing finesse; measuring differential cross sections with an increasing degree of differentiation. These results demonstrate that single ionising scattering events, assisted by collective excitations, constitute the fundamental ingredient leading to SE-generation and -emission. To this end, the interaction of Low Energy Electrons (LEEs) with various Carbon allotropes has been investigated by means of Total Electron Yield (TEY) and (e,2e)-coincidence spectroscopy measurements. Carbon allotropes are chosen as targets since they are important in technological applications where both minimisation and maximisation of the SE-yield is a relevant issue. This is the first time that such complete set of benchmarks on the SE-yield from well characterised surfaces has been gathered, interpreted and is made available to the scientific community. This comprehensive investigation has led to the disentanglement of the elementary processes relevant for the understanding of the SE-generation probability, that fully take into account both energy and momentum conservation in the collision and the band structure of the solid as well as many-body effects.

中文翻译：

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低冲击电子能下碳同素异形体的二次电子产生机制

摘要 电子发现一个多世纪后，关于无处不在的二次电子（SEs）从固体表面的产生-喷射机制仍然存在基本的但尚未解决的问题。这些 SE 应用领域的广泛性使得希望能够控制这种现象，这需要了解导致它们产生和发射的基本物理机制。这篇论文报告了在提高精细度的光谱工具的帮助下对这种纠结过程的剖析；测量差异化程度增加的差异化横截面。这些结果表明，在集体激发的辅助下，单个电离散射事件构成了导致 SE 产生和发射的基本因素。为此，已经通过总电子产率 (TEY) 和 (e,2e) 重合光谱测量研究了低能电子 (LEE) 与各种碳同素异形体的相互作用。碳同素异形体被选为目标，因为它们在技术应用中很重要，在这些应用中，SE 产量的最小化和最大化都是一个相关问题。这是第一次收集、解释并提供给科学界的关于来自良好表征的表面的 SE 产率的完整基准集。这项全面的研究导致了与理解 SE 生成概率相关的基本过程的解开，充分考虑了碰撞中的能量和动量守恒以及固体的能带结构以及多体效应.