Facilities

Our Equipment

At the heart of our lab is the JEOL JXA-8200 Electron Probe Micro-Analyzer (EPMA). The microprobe uses high-energy electrons generated from a W-metal filament to excite target samples to emit characteristic X-rays; these X-rays are collected and measured against standards of known and independently verified compositions.  Owing to the small volumes of excitation (several cubic microns), the microprobe is ideal for analysing complex, microscopic compositional and structural features at high magnification (up to about 300,000 X).  Our JXA-8200 Superprobe ™ is equipped with the following features, giving it premier advantages when it comes to microanalysis:

• Five WD-spectrometers, three equipped with flow-proportional counters, two equipped with sealed Xe-counters, used mostly for quantitative analyses, compositional mapping, line- and qualitative-scans
• LDE1, LDE2 and LDE5H diffractor crystals for light element analysis (B, C , N, O, F)
• TAP, TAPH, LiF, LiFH, PETJ and PETH diffractor crystals for main group and heavy elements
• Thermo-Noran System 7 silicon-drift ED spectrometer (SDD), used in tandem with the WD spectrometers as a powerful reconnaissance tool – detects elements from Be to U
• Gatan PanaCL cathodoluminescence detector for mapping trace amounts of visible-light emitting elements
• High-precision stage with positional reproducibility of +/- 1 micron in X-, Y- and Z-dimensions
• Ability to use both internal, JEOL software or external, Probe for EPMA™ (Probe Software Inc.) software