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The new PGAA facility at the FRM II, Garching: comparison with the PIXE results obtained at the new IBA setup at Cologne
Author(s) -
Kudějová Petra,
Materna Thomas,
Jolie Jan,
Pascovici George
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
x‐ray spectrometry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.447
H-Index - 45
eISSN - 1097-4539
pISSN - 0049-8246
DOI - 10.1002/xrs.833
Subject(s) - nist , nuclear engineering , instrumentation (computer programming) , neutron , detector , physics , calibration , homogeneous , nuclear physics , materials science , computer science , engineering , optics , operating system , quantum mechanics , natural language processing , thermodynamics
Prompt gamma‐ray activation analysis (PGAA) is proposed as a complementary non‐destructive multi‐elemental method to PIXE. At the end of 2005, a new state‐of‐the‐art PGAA facility will be built at the research reactor II (FRM II) at Garching near Munich, Germany. The facility has been moved to FRM II from the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), Switzerland, where it was successfully running from 1997 to 2001. The main principles, characteristics and advantages of the PGAA technique and the expectations for the redesigned PGAA facility (regarding the conditions of the FRM II) are presented. The new PIXE/IBA instrument built at the 10 MV tandem accelerator of the Nuclear Physics Institute of the University of Cologne is presented. For the detection of x‐rays, mainly a small Peltier‐cooled XFlash detector is used, which brings the advantage of its capability to acquire up to 300 kcps. The data acquisition is performed by digital electronics with a system based on DGF‐4C modules from X‐ray Instrumentation Associates (XIA) and with in‐house‐developed acquisition software. For the analysis of the spectra, the Gupix program is used. After the calibration of our PIXE instrument with thin MicroMatter standards, homogeneous powders of NIST Standard Reference Materials (SRM) were measured. The PIXE results were compared with nominal values given by NIST and with the results of the PGAA measurement at PSI in 2001. Our plan is to have at our disposal analytical methods (PIXE, PIGE, RBS, PGAA and neutron tomography) that can serve for applied research. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.