A new quantitative X-ray system for micro-PIXE analysis

Particle Induced X-ray Emission is a well-established technique for quantitative elemental analysis down to trace levels. During microbeam analysis, where the beam is collimated and focused into a small spot, the beam current reduces to nA or less. The generation of characteristic X-rays is reduced in the same proportion, leading to long data-acquisition times. This can partly be compensated for by using detectors with a large solid angle. In this work, the performance of an annular eight-element silicon drift detector with a total solid angle of 261 msr is described. The initial calibration of the detector was performed using thin elemental standards. Charge measurement was carried out both in a Faraday Cup positioned after the sample and by a pre-sample electrostatic deflection system sampling the beam charge into another Faraday Cup. The two methods were used in parallel and compared during the calibration measurements. A recently installed Versa Module Europe (VME) based data acquisition system equipped with, for example, multi-hit time-to-digital converters, amplifiers, and 32-channel scalers, was used to record data in event-by-event mode for simultaneous data evaluation on multiple computers. Off-line dead time and pile-up corrections were made on the event data that was sorted into spectra and fitted with the GeoPIXE software. The pre-sample deflection charge measurement gave consistent values for the calibration, and this is an important observation implying that non-conductive and thick samples will be able to quantify without the use of internal standards.