Binding Energy (BE) Scale Calibration
Energy Scale Calibration
Binding Energy (BE) Scale Calibration
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- BE Calibration – Rules
- BE Calibration Values
- BE Calibration – History
- BE Reliability Problem
- Calibration Checks – Validation of BE Scale
- Calibration Metals
- Deposited Gold
- Fermi Edge
- International BE Calibration – IXIR
- Ion Etching – Ag, Au, Cu
- ISO BE Standards
- Publishing XPS Data
- Separation in Calibration Energies (SCE) Values
- X-ray Energies
Calibration (reference) energies, developed by an international team of XPS experts, were published in 2001 by the International Standards Organization (ISO) Technical Committee (TC/201) for Surface Chemical Analysis as ISO document #15472 (titled: Surface chemical analysis – X-ray photoelectron spectrometers –Calibration of energy scales) [73].
The ISO BE calibration energies for a monochromatic Al-k-alpha source are:
Cu (2p3/2), Cu (3p3/2), Ag (3d5/2) and Au (4f7/2) signals are:
932.62, 75.13, 368.21 and 83.96 eV, respectively.
These ISO values are reported with ±0.02 eV uncertainty, and they represent the first international effort to standardize the calibration energies used to calibrate the energy scales of XPS instruments worldwide.
Table 1 shows the large variation in BE Calibration Values that were previously promoted by many XPS instrument makers. This large variation is BE Calibration values caused many scientists and researchers to publish BEs from research materials that can not be reproduced by other researchers or scientists. These large variations caused large variations in the BEs published in the literature, many handbooks and the NIST SRD20 database.
As a result we need to be careful when we use literature BE values from insulators and conductors before 2010. We need to make fresh BEs from pure materials.
Can we Calibrate the Energy Scale using ONLY Copper (Cu) ?
YES !
