Helium Atom Scattering - History

History

The first recorded He diffraction experiment was completed in 1930 by Estermann and Stern on the (100) crystal face of lithium fluoride. This experimentally established the feasibility of atom diffraction when the de Broglie wavelength, λ, of the impinging atoms is on the order of the interatomic spacing of the material. At the time, the major limit to the experimental resolution of this method was due to the large velocity spread of the helium beam. It wasn't until the development of high pressure nozzle sources capable of producing intense and strongly monochromatic beams in the 1970s that HAS gained popularity for probing surface structure. Interest in studying the collision of rarefied gases with solid surfaces was helped by a connection with aeronautics and space problems of the time. Plenty of studies showing the fine structures in the diffraction pattern of materials using helium atom scattering were published in the 1970s. However, it wasn't until a third generation of nozzle beam sources was developed, around 1980, that studies of surface phonons could be made by helium atom scattering. These nozzle beam sources were capable of producing helium atom beams with an energy resolution of less than 1meV, making it possible to explicitly resolve the very small energy changes resulting from the inelastic collision of a helium atom with the vibrational modes of a solid surface, so HAS could now be used to probe lattice dynamics. The first measurement of such a surface phonon dispersion curve was reported in 1981, leading to a renewed interest in helium atom scattering applications, particularly for the study of surface dynamics.