Improved particle location and isotopic screening measurements of sub-micron sized particles by Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry
Abstract
There are a number of applications within cosmochemistry, environmental studies, nuclear safeguards and nuclear forensic analyses that require capabilities for the location and isotopic measurement of sub-micron to micron-sized particles. This task can be divided into two sub-tasks: the first problem is to find the particle of interest in a matrix of other materials and the second is to perform accurate and precise isotopic measurements of the individual particles. This paper describes results obtained on real and standard samples using a newly developed Automated Particle Measurement (APM) software, for both Small Geometry (SG) and Large Geometry (LG)