A step-by-step guide to perform x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy

🤖 Plain-English Summary

There is a growing concern within the surface science community that the massive increase in the number of XPS articles over the last few decades is accompanied by a decrease in work quality including in many cases meaningless chemical bond assignment. What matters in the end is that the conclusions from the analysis can be trusted.

🔑 Key Findings

• Should this trend continue, it would have disastrous consequences for scientific research.
• While there are many factors responsible for this situation, the lack of insight of physical principles combined with seeming ease of XPS operation and insufficient training are certainly the major ones.
• To counter that, we offer a comprehensive tutorial written in the form of a step-by-step guide starting from experimental planning, through sample selection and handling, instrument setup, data acquisition, spectra analysis, and results presentation.

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