A thick walled capillary for ion beam collimation and ambient pressure ion beam analysis

STOYTSCHEW V.; SCHULTE-BORCHERS M.; BOZINEVIC MIHALICA I.; PÉREZ R.D.

Lanzhou

Conferencia; The Fifteenth International Conference on Nuclear Microprobe Techonology and Application (ICNMTA-2016); 2016

Glass capillaries offer a unique way to obtain small ion beam diameters via collimation and simultaneously act as an air-vacuum interface for in-air ion beam applications. Usually they have a micron to submicron diameter opening, which limits air inflow sufficiently to maintain stable conditions on the vacuum side. Normal glass capillaries are quite thin and fragile, which makes handling of the capillary in the experiment difficult.They also introduce an x-ray background produced by the capillary wall material, which has to be shielded or subtracted from data in PIXE applications. To overcome both drawbacks, a new type of conical glass capillary has been developed. It has a higher wall thickness which eliminates the low energy x-ray background produced by common capillaries and leads to a more robust collimator. This work shows the results obtained in the first tests demonstrating that this new capillary is suitable for ion beam collimation. Examples for particle induced x-ray emission as well as scanning transmission ion microscopy measurements are shown.