Experimental determination of the oxygen K-shell fluorescence yield using thin SiO2 and Al2O3 foils

Abstract

In this work, the K-shell fluorescence yield for oxygen ωO,K−shell is determined experimentally, employing the radiometrically calibrated X-ray fluorescence instrumentation of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Germany's National Metrology Institute. Four free-standing thin foils with two different thicknesses of both SiO2 and Al2O3 were used in order to derive an experimental value for this atomic fundamental parameter. Multiple excitation photon energies were applied to record fluorescence spectra of all four samples. The resulting value (ωO,K−shell=0.00688±0.00036) is almost 20 % higher than the commonly used value from the Krause tables [M. Krause, Atomic Radiative and Radiationless Yields for K and L shells, J. Phys. Chem. Ref. Data 8(2), 307–327 (1979)]. In addition, the achieved total uncertainty budget for the new experimental value is reduced significantly in comparison to available literature data. For validation purposes, thin SiO2 layers on Si samples were used. Here, the layer thicknesses derived from X-ray reflectometry are well in line with our X-ray fluorescence quantification results based on the new experimental value for the O K-shell fluorescence yield.