Nonrelativistic quantum electrodynamic approach to photoemission theory

A new nonrelativistic many-body theory to analyze X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) spectra has been developed on the basis of quantum electrodynamic (QED) Keldysh Green's function approach. To obtain XPS current density we calculate electron Green's function g< which partly includes electron-photon interactions. We first separate longitudinal and transverse parts of these Green's functions in the Coulomb gauge. The transverse electron selfenergy describes the electron-photon interaction, whereas the longitudinal electron selfenergy describes the electron-electron interaction. We derive the QED Hedin's equation from which we obtain systematic skeleton expansion in the power series of the screened Coulomb interaction W and the photon Green's function Dkl. We show the present theory provides a sound theoretical tool to study complicated many-body processes such as the electron propagation damping, intrinsic, extrinsic losses and their interference, and furthermore, resonant photoemission processes. We have also found the importance of the mixed photon Green's functions D0k and Dk0 which have been supposed to be unimportant for the XPS analyses. They, however, directly describe the radiation field screening. In this work, photon field screening effects are discussed in one-step theory, where the electron-photon interaction operator Δ is proved to be replaced by ε−1Δ beyond linear approximation. Beyond free photon Green's function approximation, photon scatterings from the electron density are incorporated within the present QED theory. These photon field effects can directly describe the microscopic photon field spatial variation specific to near the surface region and nanoparticle systems.