Ab initio study of angle-resolved electron reflection spectroscopy of few-layer graphene

Abstract

We present ab initio theory for electron reflection spectroscopy of few-layer graphene for arbitrary angles of incidence. The inelastic effects are included in a consistent way using the optical potential retrieved from ab initio simulations of electron energy-loss spectra. We demonstrate a significant impact of inelastic effects even for single-layer graphene. Next, we address the ability of the electron reflection spectroscopy to determine specific parameters of graphene including not only the number of layers in the few-layer graphene but also the stacking type in the graphene multilayers, and to resolve moir\'e patterns in twisted graphene bilayers. We show that the predicted contrast, although significantly reduced by inelastic effects, is sufficient for the experimental detection of all considered parameters. Our findings are corroborated by a fair correspondence of our theoretical predictions with experimental data, both our own and recently published by other authors.