A new XRF spectrometer using a crystal monochromator and parallel plates beam guides

Abstract

Conventional x-ray fluorescence analysis (XRF) is a powerful instrumental technique for elemental quantification of samples with a wide range of matrices coming from industry, medicine, biology, environmental and archaeometry. The scattering of the x-ray tube excitation beam from the matrix is mainly responsible of the strong background in XRF spectra which restricts the detection limit (DL) to a few ppm (w/w). One possible strategy to reduce the DL is the monochromatization of the excitation beam with a crystal monochromator. In this case, the optimization of the system components is strongly required to obtain the highest excitation count rate over the sample, since it is considerable reduced by the short energy band pass of the monochromator. In the present work an optical device composed by a Si(100) crystal monochromator and two parallel plates beam guides (PPBG) was characterized and including in a conventional XRF spectrometer to improve the DLs. The PPBGs are composed by several thin glass plate reflectors placed together and separated by spacers. Inside the gap, x-rays are transmitted by total reflection contributing to the photon flux at the output of the optical device. The first PPBG reduces the divergence of the beam striking the crystal, and the second one collects the monochromatic beam that emerges from the crystal. In this way, the design of the optical device is quite compact keeping a high photon flux at the output thanks to the wide acceptance solid angle of the PPBGs. The new XRF spectrometer was applied to the analysis of biological tissues. The first results obtained in this field are shown in the present work where the performance of the spectrometer can be evaluated.