Secondary Electron Emission from First Principles

This movie shows a proton that impacts a thin sheet of aluminum. Upon exiting the material the protons excites some electrons, shown in neon green, from the material into vacuum. For thin materials, the ion itself, shown in pink, carries away electrons, which are shown in red. This information helps us understand how electrons in the material rearrange after the impact, and eventually, this will help us engineer radiation-resistant materials and better electronics.

CREDITS:
Alina Kononov, Aneesh Jonelagadda, André Schleife, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

An award of computer time was provided by the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. This research used resources of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported under Contract DE-AC02-06CH11357.