HOLOGRAPHIC INVERSION OF DIFFUSE ELECTRON DIFFRACTION INTENSITIES FOR THE Ni(001)/K STRUCTURE

At low temperatures many adsorbates arrange in lattice gas disorder on crystalline substrates. In a low energy electron diffraction (LEED) experiment this leads to diffuse intensities super-imposed on the sharp spots caused by the substrate. For the disordered adsorption system Ni(001)/K, we present two-dimensional intensity distributions as function of the electron energy and angle of incidence. They can be measured very fast (20 s per frame) and reliably using an automatic video based data acquisition technique. We show that diffuse intensity spectra DI(E) taken as function of energy for fixed surface parallel electron momentum transfer carry the information about the local adsorption structure. This is equivalent to conventional I(E) spectra taken for sharp spots. In the light of recent proposals it is shown that the diffuse single energy intensity pattern isnota hologram of the local structure because e.g. the reference wave is ill defined. However, the diffraction processes disturbing the pure reference wave cancel when the intensities of different energies are suitably averaged. It is demonstrated that the holographic reconstruction of real space information from such scanned energy data leads to reliable and well resolved atomic images. Full widths at half-maximum of such atomic images are not greater than 1 Å. Substrate atoms behind the reference atom in direction of the incident beam are imaged best. So, image reconstructions for different beam directions produce a full and high quality three-dimensional image of the local adsorption structure.