Experimental determination of total M shell and subshell X-ray production cross sections for uranium by proton impact

Abstract

Total M and M subshell X-ray production cross sections were obtained for U by proton impact. The measured X-ray spectra were induced by proton bombarding a thick metallic target of uranium. The proton energies ranged from 0.3 to 3.4 MeV. The X-ray photons were detected by an SDD spectrometer and were analysed by a novel software for PIXE analysis. This code, called PAMPA, fits the spectrum after minimizing the quadratic differences between the experimental spectrum and an analytic function that models it starting from physical bases. The thick target approach used here together with the spectral fitting software were successfully tested in a previous work by obtaining L shell X-ray production cross sections for Mo. In this work, the methodology is extended to determine the X-ray production cross section for M subshells. The determination of these parameters is of great complexity because of the energy resolution requirement and the intricacy of the characteristic M X-ray lines. The agreement between our results, the experimental data published by other authors and theoretical predictions was analyzed.