Treating retardation effects in valence EELS spectra for Kramers–Kronig analysis

Retardation effects such as Cerenkov losses and waveguide modes alter the valence electron energy-loss spectrum of semiconductors and insulators as soon as the speed of the probing electron exceeds the speed of light inside the probed medium. This leads to the dilemma, that optical properties from these media cannot be determined correctly using electron energy-loss spectrometry (EELS) if no corrections are applied. In this work we present two ways out of this dilemma: a reduction of the beam energy and the application of an off-line correction. We demonstrate the accuracy of these two methods by using two similar layers of Si x : H having slightly different refractive indices and discuss the impact of the normalization parameter during Kramers–Kronig analysis (KKA) on the obtained dielectric properties. We further demonstrate that KKA can be applied without the use of standard specimens, if thickness determination using transmission electron microscopy and EELS is accurate enough.