Eur. Phys. J. B 37, 3-6 (2004)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2004-00023-3

Correlation in the Al plasma excitation

¹ Institute for Solid State Physics, Vienna University of Technology, 1040 Vienna, Austria
² Laboratoire MSSMat, CNRS UMR 8579, École Centrale Paris, 92295 Châtenay-Malabry, France

Corresponding author: ^a schattschneider@ifp.tuwien.ac.at

Received: 24 July 2003
Published online: 19 February 2004

Abstract

The density-density correlation function in elementary excitations of the interacting electron gas is calculated from a simple model of the dynamic form factor. For the Al plasma excitation, a correlation length of ≈ is found. It is shown that the small correlation length does not contradict the surprisingly large coherence length of almost 10 nm recently found in inelastic interference experiments. The difference of nearly 2 orders of magnitude can be traced back to the long range Coulomb interaction between probe and target electrons.