Mode damping in a commensurate monolayer solid

Abstract

The normal modes of a commensurate monolayer solid may be damped by mixing with elastic waves of the substrate. This was shown by B. Hall et al., Phys. Rev. B 32, 4932 (1985), for perpendicular adsorbate vibrations in the presence of an isotropic elastic medium. That work is generalized with an elastic continuum theory of the response of modes of either parallel or perpendicular polarization for a spherical adsorbate on a hexagonal substrate. The results are applied to the discussion of computer simulations and inelastic atomic scattering experiments for adsorbates on graphite. The extreme anisotropy of the elastic behavior of the graphite leads to quite different wave vector dependence of the damping for modes polarized perpendicular and parallel to the substrate. A phenomenological extension of the elasticity theory of the graphite to include bond-bending energies improves the description of substrate modes with strong anomalous dispersion and enables a semi-quantitative account of observed avoided crossings of the adlayer perpendicular vibration mode and the substrate Rayleigh mode.