Elimination of the inelastic tail and suppression of the background of secondaries and backscattered primaries in AES/XPS spectra

✍ Scribed by Werner, Wolfgang S. M.

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 277 KB
• Volume: 26
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0142-2421
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1096-9918(19980515)26:6<455::aid-sia389>3.0.co;2-w

✦ Synopsis

A recently developed procedure to eliminate the inelastic tail below the characteristic peaks in AES/XPS spectra is analysed theoretically and tested using experimental Auger spectra from four homogeneous solids (Au, Pt, Ta and Ni). To this end, the parameter in this procedure accounting for the details of the emission process was determined for the cylindrical mirror analyser (CMA) geometry. It is shown that application of this procedure to the raw data consistently removes the inelastic tail accompanying each characteristic peak, while at the same time the background of secondaries (and, in the case of electron-excited AES, the contribution of backscattered primaries) can be strongly suppressed, rendering the task of peak area determination trivial. The proposed procedure is shown to be applicable over a wide energy range, signiÐcantly exceeding the quasi-elastic regime.