INNOVATIVE METHODS FOR A DECONVOLUTION OF XPS SPECTRA FROM PLASMA-OXIDIZED POLYETHYLENE

X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) has been used to study the chem ical effects of oxygen plasma treatment on polyethylene films. A compa rison of previous investigations shows that the simple deconvolution b y curve-fitting leads to contradictory results. For a deconvolution we used innovative methods, The maximum entropy algorithm leads to a val id identification of chemical states. A proper consideration of the ba ckground shows that a linear background is not appropriate. For this r eason, we used a model for an insulator loss function which was inspir ed by the loss function calculated from optical data, The model depend s on four parameters which were included in the fitting process. The b ackground calculation was performed according to the method of S. Toug aard and co-workers.