Standardless analysis of heavy elements by electron probe

Since the development of EPMA (electron probe micro analysis) by Castaing's PhD thesis in 1951, great efforts have been made to improve the technique. It was believed that the use of standard samples is absolutely indispensable to the determination of the concentration of each element. This can be a limit for some fields, such as nuclear materials application, where the quantification of minor actinides in fresh or spent fuel is demanded with no availability of any standard samples. In France, Dr. A Moy (Universite de Montpellier) and his colleague have recently reported successful standardless analysis of Pb and U in PbS, PbTe, PbCl₂, Pb₅(VO₄)₃Cl (vanadinite), and UO₂, by measuring absolute Mα and Mβ X-ray intensity by a wavelength dispersive spectrometer. Experimentally obtained X-ray intensity was converted into absolute X-ray yields by evaluating the detector efficiency and then compared with calculated background X-ray intensity based on Monte Carlo simulations. For more information, see the paper, "Standardless quantification of heavy elements by electron probe microanalysis", A. Moy et al., Anal. Chem. 114, 255501 (2015).