{"doi":"10.3390/coatings10100967","title":"Soft Ion Sputtering of PAni Studied by XPS, AFM, TOF-SIMS, and STS","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.","journal":"Coatings","year":2020,"id":68656,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":22,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9605,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":365388,"name":"Zachary E. Voras","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":363859,"name":"Xiao Tong","orcid":"0000-0002-5567-9677","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":365389,"name":"Thomas P. Beebe","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":363858,"name":"Christopher M. Goodwin","orcid":"0000-0002-0062-0643","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":44,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T21:41:52.279368Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}