Recently, I have deposited the LiF on silver foil and I have done both XPS and TEM/EDX of my sample. EDX shows no oxygen presence or any other impurity in the LiF sample. SO, Is it possible that oxygen we got from XPS measurement, does not segregate in grain boundary or phase boundary?
Dear Lalit, EDX is a bulk technique and is not sensitive to surface as much as XPS. If your sample was exposed to atmosphere before XPS measurement, you will indeed get O -related signal, simply because of surface adsorbate contamination. The conclusions you propose cannot be made without more detailed explanations of experimental conditions.
EDS+TEM is pretty difficult technique to implement properly. For example, operator could choose too short dwelling time, and then nothing but main compnents would be found. By the way, how thick are your LiF layer and silver foil?
Dear Vladimir Dusevich , The LiF thickness is around 600 nm and silver is around 300 nm.
The percentage O1s coming from XPS is around 0.8 % . Can that be ignored ?
If you are looking for segregation on boundaries, nothing can be ignored. However, it looks like you did SEM work, not TEM one. SEM/EDS is not suitable for looking for boundary segregation.
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