Secondary ion mass spectrometry at close to single‐atom concentration using DC accelerators

Abstract

Abstract Experiments have been conducted which show that secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), together with the addition of a rather low voltage (2 MV) DC accelerator, can become an extremely powerful new technique in many fields of research related to the characterization of surface and bulk solids and with high spatial resolution. The technology is available today to build an instrument that would have high lateral resolution (∼ 1 μm) coupled with a secondary ion transmission coefficient from target to detector >10% with no mass interferences from molecular ions. Molecular ions can be fragmented and analyzed separately. We believe that this combination of secondary ion mass spectrometers and accelerators represents a most significant advance in analytical techniques.