Effect of binning on the inversion of ARXPS data

From a known starting depth profile, synthetic ARXPS data were produced in 96 channels distributed between photoemission angles of 23° and 83°, and Poisson noise was added to give 100 data sets which were then binned in various ways before inversion to extract a depth profile using regularization and the L-curve criterion for the regularization parameter. When the data were inverted using the mean angles in the bins, it was observed that the best profiles were obtained by using bins that were 4 or 6 channels wide. It was found however that better profiles were obtained by employing 96 channels and binning during the inversion of the ARXPS data so as to take into account the effective analyzer acceptance angle resulting from the binning of the synthetic data.