Abstract

During the last decade atomic and molecular beam techniques have been of great help for investigating the dynamics of atom or molecule-surface interaction. As long as atoms are involved in the interaction process, the measurements of angular and velocity distributions provide sufficient insight. When molecules are scattered, however, additional information on changes of the internal energy is necessary. Recently, the laser-induced fluorescence method and resonance ionization in combination with time-of-flight measurements were successfully used to determine the influence of surface interaction on the energy distribution between translational, rotational, vibrational and electronic excitation (see references [1,2] for a survey on the published work). The laser experiments lead to a complete description of the dynamics of the molecule-surface interaction.

© 1985 Optical Society of America