The new confocal heavy ion microprobe beamline at ANSTO: The first microprobe resolution tests and applications for elemental imaging and analysis

Abstract

The Centre for Accelerator Science facility at ANSTO has been expanded with the new NEC 6MV “SIRIUS” accelerator system in 2015. In this paper we present a detailed description of the new nuclear microprobe–Confocal Heavy Ion Micro-Probe (CHIMP) together with results of the microprobe resolution testing and the elemental analysis performed on typical samples of mineral ore deposits and hyper-accumulating plants regularly measured at ANSTO.The CHIMP focusing and scanning systems are based on the OM-150 Oxford quadrupole triplet and the OM-26 separated scan-coil doublet configurations. A maximum ion rigidity of 38.9amu-MeV was determined for the following nuclear microprobe configuration: the distance from object aperture to collimating slits of 5890mm, the working distance of 165mm and the lens bore diameter of 11mm. The overall distance from the object to the image plane is 7138mm.The CHIMP beamline has been tested with the 3MeV H+ and 6MeV He2+ ion beams. The settings of the object and collimating apertures have been optimized using the WinTRAX simulation code for calculation of the optimum acceptance settings in order to obtain the highest possible ion current for beam spot sizes of 1μm and 5μm. For optimized aperture settings of the CHIMP the beam brightness was measured to be ∼0.9pAμm−2mrad−2 for 3MeV H+ ions, while the brightness of ∼0.4pAμm−2mrad−2 was measured for 6MeV He2+ ions. The smallest beam sizes were achieved using a microbeam with reduced particle rate of 1000Hz passing through the object slit apertures several micrometers wide. Under these conditions a spatial resolution of ∼0.6μm×1.5μm for 3MeV H+ and ∼1.8μm×1.8μm for 6MeV He2+ microbeams in horizontal (and vertical) dimension has been achieved. The beam sizes were verified using STIM imaging on 2000 and 1000mesh Cu electron microscope grids.