element mass number problem

chenhongjun

When I did the pyrite trace element test recently, I accidentally set the element collected by Fe to 56Fe, which is generally 57Fe by default. According to my observation, I saw that 56Fe has reached tens of millions of counts and has reached the analog signal range. If I use the Fe content of the electron probe as the internal standard for calibration later, I don’t know how much impact it will have 😅

Joe

chenhongjun

I think there are (at least) two things to consider:

You may or may not have a problem with ArO on Fe56.
You may or may not have a problem with calibrating things depending on the Fe intensity of your RMs relative to your pyrite (e.g., if your RM has Fe in pulse counting, but the pyrite is in analog and the cross calibration isn't great).

If you've analyzed suitable secondary reference materials, hopefully you can convince yourself neither is a major problem. Without some secondary reference materials, I think it will be hard to have confidence in the results. If you know other elements from the probe, maybe you can check that those turn out?

Maybe/hopefully others will chime in with their thoughts! 🙂

All the best,