The Photoemission Threshold Rate

Photoemission is an important process in electrical breakdown involving a surface. The rate at which electrons are emitted from a surface has contributions from bulk and surface effects. The bulk effects involve three steps: absorption of a photon, transport of an electron and emission of that electron. The surface process is often regarded as one step that involves absorption and emission. In this talk, these contributions are combined to produce a method that includes both the photoemission from very energetic photons and also photons whose energies are near the threshold energy for photoemission. This method allows the use of approximate electronic structure methods in which the surface effects are included using a perturbation method. Results will be compared with data to illustrate the features.