Many body effects in elementary processes at metal surfaces

This review consists of a brief survey of some elementary surface processes that exhibit many body effects. We begin by discussing the electron ground state of dilute magnetic alloys and the observation of this state in real space at surfaces. We provide a short history of the Kondo effect and extend the analysis of this effect in the bulk to dilute magnetic impurities at metal surfaces. Next, we discuss how these metallic electrons behave when they are perturbed by external fields on femtosecond time scales for both bulk and surface-state electrons. We follow this with a brief discussion of how the dynamics of tunneling electrons affects the translational and rotational motion of molecular adsorbates on metal surfaces.