Hi, I am not an expert on XPS, in fact, these are the first results I have to interpret. My thin copper oxide film sample has at the surface a binding energy of 932.4 eV. When we removed the top layer, it drops to 932.1 eV, and for the next sputter step it drops down to 931.9 and then to 931.8 eV.
The literature values I found for the Cu species are from Biesinger 2010 (10.1016/j.apsusc.2010.07.086)
Cu BE 932,64 eV
Cu2O BE 932.43 eV
CuO BE 933.57 eV
The only time I found the 931.8 eV mentioned in Literature was by Park 2006 (10.1016/j.apsusc.2005.08.019)
There the authors say that in fresh cleaved copper foil they observed Cu 2p core levels at 931.8 eV.
Can anyone point me in the right direction? So far I have no clue.
Hello Kevin, was the neutralizer used during spectra acquisition?
I would recommend to record the valence band spectra in the vicinity of the Fermi level to verify that the sample is in a good contact to the spectrometer and that the instrument is correctly calibrated. The Fermi level cut-off should be exactly at zero eV.
Kevin, you have mentioned that you have a thin copper film - what is the substrate? Is it sufficiently conducting? Did you measured Carbon contaminations on your sample? What is the actual energy of the C1s peak? And, what about the X-ray excited Augers? The Auger parameter also may help to locate the origin of the observed peak shift! Good luck, Dirk
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