Identification of microscopic uranium particles using fission tracks in nuclear solid-state detectors

Improved environmental-particle analysis for safeguards is a continuing research goal. In this paper, we propose a modified method of fission-track analysis, employing the focused ion-beam (FIB) technique and using a single-crystal silicon substrate to carry dust particles. The use of a silicon substrate may eliminate the need to relocate identified particles of interest from the particle carrier to another substrate for mass-spectrometric analysis. FIB–SEM and SIMS were used to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed FTA method.