Inelastic resonance scattering, tunneling, and desorption

Excitation of a localized oscillator or phonon due to transient charge transfer into and out of electronic states linearly coupled to the oscillator is considered within several different contexts. Specifically, the basic physical content of the mechanisms responsible for phonon broadening in core-level spectroscopy, intramolecular vibrational excitation in resonant electron scattering, phonon excitation in resonant electron tunneling through quantum-well heterostructures, and hot-electron-induced resonant desorption is shown to be similar. Existing exact solutions to the scattering and tunneling problems are here adapted to resonant desorption and numerical consequences–such as excitation and desorption probabilities and translational energy distributions–are obtained. These results and insights are considered in the light of a semiclassical wave-packet-dynamics model, which previously had been developed to account for observed nonthermal, laser-induced desorption in the system NO/Pt(111).