PNNL

Abstract

The ability of charge compensation methods to control the surface potentials for two types of non-homogenous samples is examined. Results demonstrate that two newer types of charge compensation systems have improved performance in relation to some previous flood gun methods and reaffirm the concept that a primary objective of charge compensation is to find conditions for which the surface potential of the specimen is as uniform as possible. However, experiments involving both flood gun use and specimen grounding, demonstrate that peak broadening and shifting can occur when two (or more) potentials are present in the region of analysis. Finally, the ability of interface charge to shift specimen potentials and measured binding energies demonstrates fundamental limitations to the absolute accuracy of binding energy measurements, but also remind us that charging phenomena can be used to obtain important information about the sample.