Regular Article

Determination of electron inelastic mean free path of three transition metals from reflection electron energy loss spectroscopy spectrum measurement data^★

¹ Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale and Department of Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, Anhui, P.R. China
² Institute for Nuclear Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (ATOMKI), P.O. Box 51, Debrecen, Hungary
³ ELI-ALPS, ELI-HU Non-Profit, Ltd., Dugonics tér 13, 6720 Szeged, Hungary
⁴ Research and Services Division of Materials Data and Integrated System (MaDIS), National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), 1-2-1 Sengen, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0047, Japan

^a e-mail: zjding@ustc.edu.cn

Received: 8 October 2018
Received in final form: 15 November 2018
Published online: 5 February 2019

Abstract

The energy loss functions (ELFs) of three transition metals (Cr, Co and Pd) have been derived from reflection electron energy loss spectroscopy spectrum with a theoretical analysis of the measured data [Xu et al., J. Appl. Phys. 123, 043306 (2018)]. In this work, we update our previous ELFs in a wider photon energy region (0–200 eV) with a better accuracy, which is verified by sum rules and a root-mean-square deviation. The electron inelastic mean free paths (IMFPs) of Cr, Co and Pd have been calculated with the obtained ELFs by adopting a dielectric response theory. We employ both the single-pole approximation and full Penn algorithm for the calculation of IMFPs, and the calculated results are compared with other references.