ABSTRACT
Chemical characterization of surfaces plays an important role in various fields of physics and chemistry, e.g. catalysis, polymers, metallurgy and organic chemistry. This section briefly describes the concepts and a few examples of the techniques that are most frequently used for chemical surface characterization, which are x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), Auger electron spectroscopy (AES), ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy (UPS), secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), temperature programmed desorption (TPD) and electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS), respectively. We have tried to give examples in a broad range of fields. References to more extensive treatments of these techniques and others are given at the end of the section, see ‘Further reading’.
