Kratos Analytical Ltd. applications

Surface coatings and thin films are of great commercial importance in many industries and are used to enhance or provide required properties to bulk materials specific to their applications. Thin films can range from tens of Angstroms to several microns in thickness and find application in areas as diverse as optical anti-reflective coatings, architectural glazing and drug eluting thin films in the pharmaceutical industry. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) is ideally suited to characterising the surface chemistry of these thin films and when combined with sputter depth profiling can be used to determine the elemental and chemical composition as a function of depth through the film using either the AXIS Supra or AXIS Nova spectrometers.

X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy is used to characterise materials and surfaces used as catalysts for numerous chemical reactions with great success. Surface studies of catalysts range from fundamental research into core level shifts induced by adsorbed species as a model of reaction intermediates to applied research on used industrially relevant catalysts.  Here we present a number of recent papers which include data acquired using Kratos AXIS spectrometers.