Quantitative AES depth profiling of iron and chromium oxides in solid solution, (Cr1−xFex)2O3

This paper presents AES concentration-dependent sensitivity factors and a method to determine the atomic concentrations of O, Fe and Cr in (Cr 1-x Fe x ) 2 O 3 solid solutions. In addition, a solution to the problem of the overlap between the O KVV and Cr LMV peaks is presented. The new approach to evaluate solid solutions of (Cr 1-x Fe x ) 2 O 3 then has been used to evaluate the oxide formed on 304L stainless steel oxidized at 600 °C in 0.9 bar O 2 + 0.1 bar H 2 O for 168 h. The result shows great improvement in comparison to the conventional quantitative analysis of Auger results.