Characterizing the detection system nonlinearity, internal inelastic background, and transmission function of an electron spectrometer for use in x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy.

We present a method for removing spectrometer specific contributions to x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy data. We consider the degree of linearity of the detection system, the strength of the internal analyzer inelastic background, and finally determine the spectrometer's transmission function. The procedures presented here are performed on a SPECS Phoibos 150 hemispherical analyzer with a two-dimensional detection system, but are applicable to a wide variety of different electron spectrometers. The spectrometer's detection system is found to deviate from linear behavior by a few percent over the whole intensity range studied. The size of the analyzer internal inelastic scattering has been measured, and we find that it can normally be neglected at large pass energies or high kinetic energies for most types of analysis (contributing less than 1% at 100 eV pass energy). Finally, we measure the transmission function of the analyzer and lens system for a variety of different settings with the preceding corrections applied, and find that the form of the transmission function is dependent on small changes in the system's settings.