Low energy electron channeling observed by current image diffraction (CID)

Electron channeling patterns observed at LEED energies contain surface structural information. Calculations indicate that surface layer relaxations contribute to the width of the channeling lines and large relaxations can result in line splitting. Possible evidence of this has been observed on aluminum. CID images containing lines due to elastic scattering from different sets of planes can be used to determine the inner potential and planar separation simultaneously at a specified primary electron beam energy. Generally, these channeling patterns observed experimentally are in good agreement with computations based on the simple Bragg theory.