Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-12-2020

Abstract

Herein is a study of the soft sputtering method, gas cluster ion sputtering (GCIS), and its effects on the atomic, morphologic, and band structure properties of polyaniline (PAni) as studied with X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry, atomic force microscopy, and scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS). The GCIS source used was a 1000 argon atom cluster with 4 keV energy, which resulted in a sputter yield of 3.4 ± 0.2 × 10−3 nm3 per argon atom. Soft ion sputtering reduced the sample by explicitly removing the oxidized contaminants as determined by surface sensitive techniques: XPS and Time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (TOF-SIMS). By the use of STS we found that by removing the oxidized components, an overall shift of electronic states occurred, transitioning the states closer to the Fermi edge by 0.3 V.

Publication Title

Coatings

ISSN

2079-6412

Publisher

MDPI

Volume

10

Issue

967

First Page

1

Last Page

12

DOI

10.3390/coatings/0100967

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