On a hyperbolic conservation law of electron transport in solid materials for electron probe microanalysis

Abstract

The prediction of X-ray intensities based on the distribution of electrons throughout solid materials is essential to solve the inverse problem of quantifying the composition of materials in electron probe microanalysis (EPMA) [3]. We present a hyperbolic conservation law for electron transport in solid materials and investigate its validity under conditions typical for EPMA experiments. The conservation law is based on the time-stationary Boltzmann equation for binary electron-atom scattering. We model the energy loss of the electrons with a continuous slowing-down approximation. A first order moment approximation with respect to the angular variable is discussed. We propose to use a minimum entropy closure to derive a system of hyperbolic conservation laws, known as the M1 model [11]. A finite volume scheme for the numerical solution of the resulting equations is presented. Important numerical aspects of the scheme are discussed, such as bounds for the finite propagation speeds, as well as difficulties arising fromspatial discontinuities in thematerial coefficients and the scaling of the characteristic velocities with the stopping power of the electrons.We compare the accuracy and performance of the numerical solution of the hyperbolic conservation law to Monte Carlo simulations. The results indicate a reasonable accuracy of the proposed method and showthat compared to the MonteCarlo simulation the finite volume scheme is computationally less expensive.