Use of combined NAA and SIMS analyses for impurity level isotope detection

Abstract

Neutron activation analysis (NAA) offers advantages for detecting impurity levels of select isotopes that have suitable neutron cross sections. Secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) on the other hand detects most isotopes, but suffers various molecular interferences and covers only a small beam size volume per run. These two methods are combined here to study a large number of isotopes in titanium thin films in an electrolytic cell experiment. Nine isotopes are covered by NAA and over 50 with SIMS. An overlap in the data sets allows a normalization of SIMS data to the more accurate NAA measurements.