Dependence of Calculated Effective Attenuation Lengths on Transport Mean Free Paths Obtained from Two Atomic Potentials

Published

October 16, 2008

Author(s)

Cedric J. Powell, Aleksander Jablonski

Abstract

We report changes in electron effective attenuation lengths (EALs) resulting from use of transport mean free paths (TMFPs) obtained from the Dirac-Hartree-Fock (DHF) potential instead of the Thomas-Fermi-Dirac (TFD) potential in an algorithm used in the NIST Electron Effective-Attenuation-Length Database (SRD 82). TMFPs from the former potential are believed to be more reliable than those obtained from the latter potential. We investigated changes in the EALs for selected photoelectron and Auger-electron lines in four elemental solids (Si, Cu, Ag, and W), for Si 2p photoelectrons of varying energy in SiO2, and for photoelectrons excited by Al K? X-rays in four candidate gate-dielectric materials (HfO2, ZrO2, HfSiO4, and ZrSiO4). For each material, we computed the change in the average EAL for a range of overlayer-film thicknesses from zero to a maximum value corresponding to attenuation of the substrate signal to 10 % of its original value. This EAL change was a maximum for electrons emitted normally from the surface and decreased monotonically with increasing emission angle. The maximum EAL change varied between 4.4 % to 2.6 % for the three groups of materials. We found that the maximum EAL change correlated mainly with the TMFP change. We found that TMFP changes in other solids could generally lead to maximum EAL changes between 2.6 % and 1.9 % for electron energies between 500 eV and 2000 eV. For lower energies, the maximum EAL changes could be larger for some solids. Our revised EALs for Si 2p photoelectrons in SiO2 excited by Mg and Al K? X-rays agree within about 3 % with values reported by Seah and Spencer from a detailed analysis of SiO2 film-thickness measurements by XPS and other techniques.

Citation

Surface and Interface Analysis

Pub Type

Journals

Keywords

copper, electron effective attenuation length, hafnium dioxide, hafnium silicate, silicon, silicon dioxide, silver, transport mean free path, tungsten

Citation

Powell, C. and Jablonski, A. (2008), Dependence of Calculated Effective Attenuation Lengths on Transport Mean Free Paths Obtained from Two Atomic Potentials, Surface and Interface Analysis (Accessed April 24, 2024)