Current trends in the theories of gas-surface interaction

Studies on gas-surface dynamics have acquired considerable importance recently not only for their intrinsic scientific interest but also for their technological potential. This article first briefly describes various experimental techniques and a number of interesting recent observations resulting from these techniques. It then discusses certain important theoretical methodologies being extensively used nowadays. There arethreebroad overlapping streams of theoretical works, viz classical, semi-classical and quantum-mechanical. There are alsothreebasic problems in gas-surface interaction, viz (i) the interface presents a manybody problem; (ii) the solid surface is “rough”; (iii) the number of diffractive and inelastic channels is enormously large. The semi-classical approaches appear to dominate over the others in variety and quantity. But the sources of benchmark theoretical results are still the rigorous classical-trajectory and close-coupling quantum-mechanical calculations. The coming years are likely to witness not only increased numerical accuracy through refinements in semi-classical and quantum-mechanical approaches, but also certain special approximate methods designed to yield deeper physical insights into the nature of gas-surface interaction.