Abstract. The energy-resolved momentum densities of thin polycrystalline aluminium films have been measured using electron momentum spectroscopy (EMS), for both the valence band and the outer core levels. The spectrometer used for these measurements has energy and momentum resolutions of around 1.0 eV and 0.15 atomic units, respectively. These measurements should, in principle, describe the electronic structure of the film very quantitatively, i.e. the dispersion and the intensity can be compared directly with theoretical spectral momentum densities for both the valence band and the outer core levels. Multiple scattering is found to hamper the interpretation somewhat. The core-level intensity distribution was studied with the main purpose of setting upper bounds on these multiple-scattering effects. Using this information we wish to obtain a full understanding of the valence band spectra using different theoretical models of the spectral function. These theoretical models differ significantly and only the cumulant expansion calculation that takes the crystal lattice into account seems to describe the data reasonably well.

Print publication: Issue 18 (10 May 1999)
Received 20 January 1999