Quantitative analysis by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy without reference samples

A comparison between X-ray fluorescence analysis (XRFA) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) indicates the applicability of these two methods as relative and absolute techniques. For XPS the absolute field of application should be preferred. An improvement of the Hirokawa-Ebel method (an absolute XPS analysis) is presented in this paper. It is shown that the knowledge of the inelastic mean free paths of the photoelectrons (IMFP) is no longer required, but the energy dependence of the IMFPs can be used as a basis. This guarantees simplicity and much more universal applicability.