Diffraction and absorption of inelastically scattered electrons for K-shell ionization.

Abstract

An expression for the nonlocal inelastic-scattering cross section for fast electrons in a crystalline environment, which explicitly includes diffraction as well as absorption for the inelastically scattered electrons, is used to carry out realistic calculations of K-shell electron-energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) and energy dispersive x-ray (EDX) analysis cross sections. Our calculations demonstrate quantitatively why, in EDX spectroscopy, integration over the dynamical states of the inelastically scattered electron averages in such a way that an effective plane wave representation of the scattered electrons is a good approximation. This is only the case for large enough acceptance angles of ..