“…At first sight it is therefore surprising that a Zr rich surface oxide shows a distinct core level binding energy with respect to that of Zr in PZT. However, the XPS data in the literature shows that the Zr binding energy is (181.4 ±0.1) eV in PZT [10,24,35,32,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46] and (182.4 ±0.3) eV in ZrO 2 [47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56], in excellent agreement with the 1 eV shift measured here. Beyond the immediate chemical environment of the Zr emitter, two other effects may influence the BE shift.…”