Vibrational Excitation of H₂ Scattering from Cu(111): Effects of Surface Temperature and of Allowing Energy Exchange with the Surface

on the measured vibrational excitation is due to an electronically nonadiabatic mechanism. However, by itself, enabling energy exchange with the surface by modeling surface phonons and ehp's leads to reduced vibrational excitation, further decreasing the agreement with experiment. The simulated gain peak is quite sensitive to energy shifts in calculated vibrational excitation probabilities and to shifts in a specific experimental parameter (the chopper opening time). While the GLO+F calculations allow important qualitative conclusions, comparison to quantum dynamics results suggests that, with the quasi-classical way of describing nuclear motion and the present box quantization method for assigning the final vibrational state, the gain peak is not yet described with quantitative accuracy. Ways in which this problem might be resolved in the future are discussed.