Elastic and inelastic scattering components in the angular intensity distribution of He scattered from graphite

The angular intensity distribution of thermal energy He beam scattered from highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) surface has been measured by means of supersonic molecular beam scattering technique in the wide surface temperature range. To separate the elastic and inelastic scattering components, simple analysis method has been developed by applying the classical binary collision theory of the hard cube model (HCM). From the extracted elastic scattering component in the scattering distribution, the Debye temperature of the HOPG surface has been derived as 590 ± 30 K. On the basis of the HCM analysis for the extracted inelastic scattering components of He beam, the effective mass for the HOPG surface has been found to be 72 u (six carbon atoms).