Study of Cu Content Reference Materials Used in AlCu Films for X-ray Energy/Wavelength-Dispersive Spectrometer Calibration

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors report a detailed study on the realization of a reference material of AlCu for EDX analises. Though the reported measurements are well described and statistical evaluation of experimental data are well performed, the paper focuses  only only on a tecnique calibration, not on the investigation on original films with a scientific relevance. For this reason I think that the paper topic is out of the main interests for Coatings, thus I suggest to find a more suitable journal and reject it for publication in Coatings. 

Author Response

Thanks for this considerate comment. The main reason for suggesting the rejection of the manuscript, is the fact that it mainly focuses on a characterization technique and not on a material itself or any processing technique or associated property. However, the scope of the journal Coatings (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/coatings/about) clearly states that the study of "characterization techniques" are topics of interest, and thus, the manuscript falls within the scope of the journal Coatings.

Reviewer 2 Report

The article may be published.

English needs to be improved.

Author Response

We sincerely accept the English Language comment. The Quality of English Language has been improved.

Reviewer 3 Report

1) Please, add a list of acronyms and symbols.

2) Can you specify the characteristics of the AFM cantilever used, please?

3) I suppose you report roughness as average of many measurements, if it's right, please, specify how many measurements you made of each sample. It may be useful, also, to specify the dimension of the images on which you made roughness measurements.

Author Response

1. Please, add a list of acronyms and symbols.

Thanks for this considerate comment. A list of acronyms and symbols is added at the end of the paper.

2. Can you specify the characteristics of the AFM cantilever used, please?

Thanks for this comment. The used AFM cantilever is Rtespa-150. We added this in the experiment part.

3. I suppose you report roughness as average of many measurements, if it's right, please, specify how many measurements you made of each sample. It may be useful, also, to specify the dimension of the images on which you made roughness measurements.

Thanks very much for providing us with this analysis. We understand that the roughness, thickness, and grain size of the film in the edge region and the center region of the substrate will definitely be slightly different. Therefore, multiple tests and tests in different areas can definitely provide more accurate roughness data. We conducted a measurement in the middle region of each sample, and the roughness was relatively small (12-25 nm), while the electron beam bombarded the thin film with a volume of several hundred nanometers or even larger, and the slight change in roughness should not affect the measurement of element content, so we did not do many roughness tests in the paper. We will do more in related work in the future. The dimension of the AFM images is added in the paper.

Reviewer 4 Report

The authors Studied the Cu content reference materials of AlCu films for X-ray 2 energy/wavelength dispersive spectrometer calibration. the manuscript has been written in a suitable way, however, it needs to improve:

1- The whole manuscript needs a grammar check.

2- The resolution of Figure 2 is not very clear.

3- The authors should calculate the standard error and Chi^2.

4- The authors should use SPss which offers advanced statistical analysis.

 

the English language needs more improving

Author Response

1. The whole manuscript needs a grammar check.

Thanks for this considerate comment. The grammar and English language of the whole manuscript have been improved.

2. The resolution of Figure 2 is not very clear.

Thanks for this considerate comment. We notice that Figure 2 is really not very clear. The reason is that the scanning speed during imaging is too fast and the pixel resolution is not high enough. The resolution of the original image cannot be changed, and the modification time of this paper is very short, so we cannot re-test the samples. In future experiments, we will try to improve the resolution of the image.

3. The authors should calculate the standard error and Chi^2.

Thanks for this comment. the standard error has been calculated in the paper.

4.  The authors should use SPss which offers advanced statistical analysis.

Thanks for this considerate comment. We have learned the function of SPss software, which has very good statistical analysis function and is also very suitable for analyzing the data in this paper. Because the modification time is very short, we cannot use the software to re-analyze the full text of the data. In the future, we will use SPss software for data analysis.

 

The English language needs more improving.

We sincerely accept the English Language comment. The Quality of English Language has been improved.