Comments on “A study of amorphous Ti–Ni alloys by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy”

Abstract

Recently, Seabolt et al. have published a paper [M.A. Seabolt, W.R. Ogden, A.R. Chourasia, A. Ishida, J. Electron Spectrosc. Relat. Phenom. 135 (2004) 135] in which – among others – they determine the density of states (DOS) in some materials by electron spectroscopic means. The experimental work they do is impressive and they do a pioneering work with trying to make a quantitative analysis of the density of states. However, the oversimplified data evaluation method strongly degrades the value of their work. The authors state (but do not show) that the results of a complementary analysis support their conclusions, but the principle and some technical mistakes during the data evaluation make some results of the work unreliable. Below, their data analysis method is scrutinized and it is shown that the quantitative information they derive is more likely a data evaluation artifact, stemming from the inherent features of the Shirley-type background removal, rather than a quantitative measure of the DOS. In electron spectroscopy of solids one of the most challenging problems is to separate the contributions of intrinsic and extrinsic inelastic energy loss processes. Although theoretically the task can be solved, the practical methods (derived on the basis of some simplified theoretical models) involve a lot of approximations and because of this they have a range of validity that should be respected. The Shirley background procedure is very popular because of its simplicity and because it produces a closed peak area in a relatively short energy range. On the other side, the Shirley method has no model based background, although it is frequently stated (without proof) that it removes both the extrinsic and intrinsic contributions from the measured spectrum. Because of this, it is at least questionable if this simple method could be used to extract quantitative density of states at the Fermi level from experimental spectra, as was done in [M.A. Seabolt, W.R. Ogden, A.R. Chourasia, A. Ishida, J. Electron Spectrosc. Relat. Phenom. 135 (2004) 135].