XPS Research Institute Objectives
- Improve charge referencing – develop new charge referencing method
- Improve charge control – compensation
- Improve BE reliability – reproducibility
- Improve Atom% reliability
- Teach correct method for Peak-fitting
- Provide energy scale calibration using only Copper (Cu) metal
- Provide library of histograms with Std Dev
- Provide periodic table of useful FWHM for peak-fitting
- Provide certification system
XPS Problems affecting BEs and Atom %s
- NIST Database of BEs for Insulators are NOT very reliable
- BEs in Books and Journals are based on or copied NIST Database BEs – therefore not very reliable
- Charge referencing for Insulators is not very reliable
- Method to produce atom% has issues – peak endpoints, IMFP, SFs
- Histograms of NIST BEs reveal large BE ranges, std dev of mean BE
- Bad peak-fitting produces wrong chemical state assignments
- Bad peak-fitting limits development/reliability of new materials and science
- Academia lists calibration BEs, but does not measure or check BEs on same day
- Editors and reviewers do not require section on instrument and analysis details
- Adventitious carbon is used to charge reference insulators
- Thickness of adventitious carbon affects charge referencing
- Peak-fits do not use sensible FWHM