ELASTIC RECOIL DETECTION ANALYSIS WITH HEAVY-IONS

Detection of elastically scattered recoils instead of projectiles offe rs the possibility to unambiguously identify sample components and is still a quantitative method for materials analysis. Large electrostati c accelerators delivering high energetic heavy ion beams of excellent quality and large area ionization detectors with particle and position resolution are shown to be a very suited combination to fully utilize the potential of the ERDA method. Using 170 MeV I or 200 MeV Au beams a sensitivity below 10(14) atoms/cm2 and depth resolution below 10 nm were obtained with 7.5 msr detector solid angle. The position resolut ion enables the correction of kinematic energy shifts and, in addition , the observation of blocking patterns from single crystalline materia ls.