Calculations of electron inelastic mean free paths

Abstract We report calculations of electron inelastic mean free paths (IMFPs) for 50–2000 eV electrons in 14 elemental solids (Li, Be, diamond, graphite, Na, K, Sc, Ge, In, Sn, Cs, Gd, Tb, and Dy) and for one solid (Al) using better optical data than in our previous work. The new IMFPs have also been used to test our TPP‐2M equation for estimating IMFPs in these materials. We found surprisingly large root‐mean‐square (RMS) deviations (39.3–71.8%) between IMFPs calculated from TPP‐2M and those calculated here from optical data for diamond, graphite and cesium; previously we had found an average RMS deviation of 10.2% for a group of 27 elemental solids. An analysis showed that the large deviations occurred for relatively small computed values of the parameter β in the TPP‐2M equation (β ∼ 0.01 for diamond and graphite) and also for relatively large values of β (β ∼ 0.25 for Cs). Although such extreme values of β are unlikely to be encountered for many other materials, the present results indicate an additional limitation in the reliability of the TPP‐2M equation. We also show that the parameter N v in the TPP‐2M equation should be computed for the rare‐earth elements from the number of valence electrons and the six 5p electrons. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.