Practical peak area measurements in X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy

Abstract

Abstract An assessment of the reliability of peak area measurements using the simple linear background subtraction approach has been made by comparing the results obtained by a number of workers from a set of simulated spectra mixing the Fe 2p peaks from Fe metal and Fe 2 O 3 . The simulated spectra are generated from Gaussian peaks with a step background similar to that of Shirley, but modified to reproduce the sloping background on the low kinetic energy side of the peak. The results show that systematic errors in the total area of the Fe 2p peak may be as great as 40% using the workers best estimate of the background line. An alternative approach involving the areas of both 2p 3/2 and 2p 1/2 peaks reduces this error to 17%.