Using Ion Imaging to Measure Velocity Distributions in Surface Scattering Experiments

We present a new implementation of ion imaging for the study of surface scattering processes. The technique uses a combination of spatial ion imaging with laser slicing and delayed pulsed extraction. The scattering velocities of interest are parallel to the imaging plane, allowing speed and angular distributions to be extracted from a single image. The first results of direct scattering of N-2 from a clean, single-crystal Au(111) surface are reported, and the speed resolution is shown to be competitive with current state-of-the-art time-of-flight methods for velocity measurements while providing simultaneous measurements of in-plane angular distributions.