TY - JOUR A1 - Gross, Thomas A1 - Kühn, Gerhard A1 - Unger, Wolfgang T1 - Photoelectron spectroscopy on organic surfaces: X-ray degradation of oxygen-plasma-treated and chemically reduced poly(propylene) surfaces in comparison to conventional polymers N2 - The X-ray-induced sample damage during mono XPS analysis of an oxygen-plasma-oxidized and subsequently wet-chemically reduced poly(propylene) film was investigated as a showcase for plasma-modified or plasma-deposited samples. By doing this, the degradation index approach as introduced by Beamson and Briggs in the Scienta ESCA300 high-resolution XPS database of organic polymers has been adopted. As to be expected, the sample degrades by loosing oxygen as revealed by observation of decreasing O/C and COR/Csum ratios. However, the X-ray degradation indices are definitely higher than those of conventional reference polymers. Moreover, the COR/Csum degradation index is significantly higher in comparison with one obtained for the O/C ratio. In that context, there is no difference between the plasma sample and a conventional poly(vinyl alcohol) polymer. It is concluded that for reliable quantitative surface chemical analysis, the quality of spectra in terms of acquisition times must be optimized aimed to a minimization of X-ray degradation. Finally, it is proposed to describe the photon flux of an X-ray gun in an XPS experiment, which defines the degradation rate at the end, by using the sample current simply measured with a carefully grounded sputter-cleaned reference silver sample. KW - Photoelectron spectroscopy KW - ESCA/XPS KW - Surfaces KW - Surface modification KW - Poly(propylene) (PP) KW - Plasma treatment KW - X-ray KW - Degradation PY - 2009 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1002/sia.3024 SN - 0142-2421 SN - 1096-9918 VL - 41 IS - 5 SP - 445 EP - 448 PB - Wiley CY - Chichester AN - OPUS4-19252 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -