NAA Normalized SIMS Analysis of an Impurity Level Isotope Array

G. H. Miley, N. Luo, G. Narne

Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering

University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801

Abstract

Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) has many advantages for detection of impurity level isotopes in various media such as metals. However, a number of isotopes may not have suitable neutron cross-sections for such analysis. Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS) on the other hand detects most isotopes, but suffers from various molecular interferences and coverage of only a small interaction beam size volume per run. These methods were combined here to study a large number of isotopes in thin films of titanium in an electrolytic cell experiment. In this case, nine isotopes were covered by NAA and over 50 with SIMS. An overlap in the data sets allowed a normalization of the SIMS data to the more precise NAA concentration studies.