NiCo alloy as a new reference material for quantitative surface analysis

✍ Scribed by D. Fujita; A. Tanaka; K. Goto; T. Homma

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1990
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 419 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0142-2421
• DOI: 10.1002/sia.740160136

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

For the improvement of quantitative surface analysis using Auger electron spectroscopy (AES) we propose an NiCo alloy system as a candidate for a ‘primary reference material’ to be used for evaluating the accuracy of quantitative surface analysis. A NiCo alloy was chosen for two reasons. Firstly, the concentrations of the alloys (Ni~49~Co~51~,Ni~75~Co~25~) at the surface and in the near‐surface region were found to be homogeneous, i.e. phenomena such as preferential sputtering and ion irradiation‐induced surface segregation were no observed with angle‐resolved XPS measurements during 1 keV Ar^+^ ion sputtering. Secondly, the corrections of matrix effects of NiCo alloys, such as the atomic density, the back‐scattering factor and inelastic mean free path corrections, were calculated and found to be negligibly small.