Chaotic scattering of He atoms off a Cu surface with corrugated Morse potential

Abstract

We consider a Hamiltonian system that models the scattering of helium atoms off a copper surface. The interaction between the He and the Cu atoms is described by a corrugated Morse potential. Using corrugation coefficients values in the potential obtained by fitting to experimental values, we prove that, provided some coefficient of an auxiliary function is different from 0, there are regions of the phase space, corresponding to sufficiently large energy of the incident atom, where the scattering is chaotic. Furthermore, we prove that the system has oscillatory motions.