Conversion of Auger sensitivities at one primary excitation energy to those at another

Abstract In Auger electron spectroscopy, the relative sensitivities of elements, which are widely used in quantitative analysis, are primarily obtained by measurement. Nevertheless, it is very tedious to collect all relative elemental sensitivity factors for different primary electron beam energies. In view of this, we have examined methods of deriving the relative sensitivity factor for an arbitrary electron beam energy from one experimental value determined at a set energy. For this calculation, we have to consider the contributions of the ionization cross‐section and the electron backscattering factor. Several formulas for the ionization cross‐section and the backscattering correction factor have been reported. We have performed experiments to examine their correction accuracy. It was found that when Gryziński's formula is used as the ionization cross‐section and Love‐Scott's formula as the backscattering correction factor, the difference between calculated sensitivity values and measured values was found to be <15% for excitation energies of <20 keV.