Supernumerary Rainbows in the Angular Distribution of Scattered Projectiles for Grazing Collisions of Fast Atoms with a LiF(001) Surface

Fast atoms with keV energies are scattered under a grazing angle of incidence from a clean and flat LiF(001) surface. For scattering along low index azimuthal directions within the surface plane ("axial surface channeling") we observe pronounced peak structures in the angular distributions for scattered projectiles that are attributed to "supernumerary rainbows." This phenomenon can be understood in the framework of quantum scattering only and is observed here up to projectile energies of 20 keV. We demonstrate that the interaction potential and, in particular, its corrugation for fast atomic projectiles at surfaces can be derived with a high accuracy.