Theory of Spin-Polarized Photoemission from Nonmagnetic Metals: Platinum

Abstract

We develop a fully relativistic theory of the process of photoemission from paramagnetic metals and illustrate it by explicit calculations of the photocurrent and the spin polarization of electrons photoemitted from a single-crystal platinum sample. Our results are in good agreement with the available experimental data and indicate that energy-, angle-, and spin-resolved photoemission spectroscopy is a powerful new probe of the electronic structure even in the case of nonmagnetic metals.