AVS 57th International Symposium & Exhibition
    Exhibitors & Manufacturers Technology Spotlight Tuesday Sessions
       Session EW-TuL

Paper EW-TuL2
A Multi-technique Approach to the Characterization of Patterned Polymers Using ESCALAB 250Xi

Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 12:20 pm, Room Southwest Exhibit Hall

Session: Exhibitors & Manufacturers Technology Spotlight
Presenter: P. Mack, ThermoFisher Scientific, UK
Authors: P. Mack, ThermoFisher Scientific, UK
R.G. White, ThermoFisher Scientific, UK
A. Wright, ThermoFisher Scientific, UK
Correspondent: Click to Email

Surface treatment of polymers produces materials that exhibit a wide range of surface compositions, properties and structures. The chemical and structural properties of these novel materials can be exploited for the fabrication of devices for bio-medical and electronics applications. The combination of a variety of complementary surface-sensitive electron spectroscopies maximizes the information available to the analyst for full quantitative surface characterization of standard and patterned polymer surfaces

This presentation will show how the new Thermo Scientific ESCALAB 250Xi, a multi-technique surface analysis system, can be used to investigate the chemistry and structure of various standard and patterned polymer samples. Chemical changes produced by surface treatments were examined by high energy resolution XPS and angle resolved XPS. Complementary REELS measurements were used to examine the level of carbon unsaturation at the uppermost surface of each of the polymer samples. Ultraviolet Photoelectron Spectroscopy (UPS), REELS and XPS valence band analysis were used together to comprehensively evaluate the valence electronic structure of the polymers.

Chemical and elemental changes as a function of X, Y coordinate were evaluated on both the microscopic and macroscopic scale, employing techniques such as high spatial resolution parallel imaging. The continuous position imaging detector on the ESCALAB 250Xi allows fully quantitative images to be acquired, with full XPS region spectra at each imaging pixel. The ability of ESCALAB 250Xi’s advanced Principal Components Analysis algorithms to streamline the processing of such imaging data will be demonstrated.