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Abstract:
We study the influence of angular degrees of freedom of magnetic adatoms on metallic surfaces onto scanning tunneling spectra. Kondo scattering of electrons off the adatom changes the local density of states near the Fermi level. The spatial dependence of this correction is set by the orbital structure of the local moment localized on the adatom. By considering a multilevel Anderson model with non-degenerate orbitals of differing orbital structure, we demonstrate that the spatial dependence of the scanning tunneling spectrum contains sufficient information to infer the orbital degrees of freedom of the magnetic adatom.