The scanning Auger microprobe can be widely used for the analysis of sub-micron area of industrial products; e.g. semiconductors, metals, inorganic materials etc. In high-resolution AES analysis the current density of primary electron is very high. It is, then, very important to estimate the electron beam damage of the specimen quantitatively, especially for oxides. Much work has been done for the evaluation of electron irradiation damage of SiO2 by AES. However, it is very complicated or tedious task to determine the critical dose of electrons from intensity of the Si LVV Auger spectra vs. irradiation time quantitatively. Then, we propose a simple measurement method using the effective decomposition cross section (ECS) of SiO2/Si sample due to electron irradiation (instead of the critical dose) from the intensity measurement of metallic Si LVV peak. The critical electron dose of SiO2 could be calculated from the values of decomposition cross sections of SiO2 and SiO.
