Foundations and trends of high resolution energy dispersive PIXE (HiRED-PIXE)

Abstract

High Resolution Particle Induced X-ray Emission, for short HR-PIXE, dates back to 1977 and is, therefore, nearly as old as standard PIXE itself. Until roughly ten years ago, High Resolution PIXE (HR-PIXE) work used only wavelength dispersive spectrometers (WDS). The installation, in 2008, of an X-ray Microcalorimeter Spectrometer, XMS at CTN (ITN at the time) 3MV tandetron, altered this situation and, as can be recognised today, will lead to major changes in PIXE, and open up many possibilities that have been hindered so far. In this work, motives, developments, important breakthrough results obtained until now, and a case study displaying speciation data and complementary information from nuclear magnetic relaxometry, are presented and discussed, showing the full quantitative potential of High Resolution Energy Dispersion PIXE (HiRED-PIXE), in particularly the opening up of the possibility to establish fast and efficient methods for quantitative elemental speciation in unknown samples.