CARRIER EXCITATION BY ATOMIC COLLISIONS AT SEMICONDUCTOR SURFACES.

We have furthered our understanding of the collisional excitation of carriers at semiconductor surfaces by hyperthermal neutral atoms with additional experiments and analyses. We compare the excitation efficiency of Xe to Kr over a range of energies and angles for the InP(100) surface. We introduce optical carrier excitation to characterize the samples and to determine carrier recombination rates in order to extract an absolute collisional excitation probabilities. We apply this to the InP(110) surface. The results confirm on a more quantitative basis the concept of a rapid equilibration of electronic excitations to a transient local lattice excitation in the vicinity of the atomic impact.