Simulation of parallel angle-resolved X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy data

The effects of elastic scattering and photoionization anisotropy have been studied for angle-resolved XPS (ARXPS) instruments in which the angular distribution is measured for a fixed sample geometry, in contrast to conventional ARXPS in which the sample is tilted for angular variation. The analyzed data were generated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology database for the Simulation of Electron Spectra for Surface Analysis, which provides a simple way to study the influence of the aforementioned effects on compositional depth profile reconstruction. The above mentioned effects have been studied for a 15-angstrom film of SiO2 on Si covered by a 5-angstrom carbon contamination layer. For this sample, the effects of anisotropy were stronger than the effects of elastic scattering. Larger effects of elastic scattering have been observed for HfO2 sample. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.