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Celebrating 40 Years of Energy Dispersive X-Ray Spectrometry in Electron Probe Microanalysis: A Historic and Nostalgic Look Back into the Beginnings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2009

Klaus Keil ,
Ray Fitzgerald  and
Kurt F.J. Heinrich
Klaus Keil*
Affiliation:
Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA
Ray Fitzgerald
Affiliation:
8422 La Jolla Shores Dr., La Jolla, CA 92037, USA
Kurt F.J. Heinrich
Affiliation:
804 Blossom Dr., Rockville, MD 20850, USA
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: keil@hawaii.edu
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Abstract

On February 2, 1968, R. Fitzgerald, K. Keil, and K.F.J. Heinrich published a seminal paper in Science (159, 528–530) in which they described a solid-state Si(Li) energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS) for electron probe microanalysis (EPMA) with, initially, a resolution of 600 eV. This resolution was much improved over previous attempts to use either gas-filled proportional counters or solid-state devices for EDS to detect X-rays and was sufficient, for the first time, to make EDS a practically useful technique. It ushered in a new era not only in EPMA, but also in scanning electron microscopy, analytical transmission electron microscopy, X-ray fluorescence analysis, and X-ray diffraction. EDS offers many advantages over wavelength-dispersive crystal spectrometers, e.g., it has no moving parts, covers the entire X-ray energy range of interest to EPMA, there is no defocusing over relatively large distances across the sample, and, of particular interest to those who analyze complex minerals consisting of many elements, all X-ray lines are detected quickly and simultaneously.

Keywords

energy dispersive spectroscopyelectron probe microanalyzerSi(Li) detector
Type
Special Section: 40 Years of EDS
Information
Microscopy and Microanalysis , Volume 15 , Issue 6 , December 2009 , pp. 476 - 483
Copyright
Copyright © Microscopy Society of America 2009

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References

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