Looking Deeper: Angle-Resolved Photoemission with Soft and Hard X-rays

Traditional angle-resolved photoemission (ARPES) with excitation in the ca. 20 to 150 eV range has clearly evolved to be the technique of choice for studying the electronic structure of surfaces and complex new strongly correlated and magnetic materials. However, it is clear that ARPES with excitation only up to 150 eV or so remains a very surface-sensitive probe, thus necessitating careful in-situ sample treatment, cleaving, or even synthesis to avoid the measurement of surface-associated artifacts. A key measure of this surface sensitivity is the electron inelastic mean free path (IMFP orΛe), which measures the mean depth of electron emission without inelastic scattering, and both experimental [1 Offi, F., Iacobucci, S., Vilmercati, P., Rizzo, A., Goldoni, A., Sacchi, M. and Panaccione, G. 2008. Physical Review B, 77: 201101R[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 2 Offi, F., Iacobucci, S., Petaccia, L., Gorovikov, S., Vilmercati, P., Rizzo, A., Ruocco, A., Goldoni, A., Stefani, G. and Panaccione, G. 2010. Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter, 22: 305002[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]] and theoretical [3 Tanuma, S., Powell, C. J. and Penn, D. R. 2011. Surface and Interface Analysis, 43: 689[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]] IMFP studies showing that the only reliable way to increase bulk or buried layer/interface sensitivity for all material types is to go to higher photon energies in the soft X-ray (ca. 0.5–2 keV) or hard X-ray (ca. 2–10 keV) regime.