Improvement of the depth resolution in sputter depth profiling by elastic peak electron spectroscopy

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Abstract
Sputter depth profiling using elastic peak electron spectroscopy (EPES) is applied to a Ge/Si multilayer structure. The results are evaluated quantitatively using the mixing–roughness–information depth (MRI) model. It is shown that for an elastic peak energy of 1.0 keV the information depth is considerably lower (0.8 nm) compared with that of the Ge LMM (1147 eV) peak (1.6 nm) used in AES depth profiling, resulting in a respectively improved depth resolution for EPES profiling under otherwise similar conditions. Because of the high signal‐to‐noise ratio, EPES depth profiling is successfully applied to measure small diffusion lengths of the order of 1 nm at Ge/Si interfaces. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.