Thin film analysis with nuclear methods

Nuclear physics provides a number of unique methods to analyse thin films i n the range of tens to hundreds of nanometres thickness. This article first describes the basics and recent applications of the most prominent ion-bea m analysis techniques, such as Rutherford backscattering, nuclear reaction analysis, elastic recoil detection, ion channelling, and particle induced X -ray emission. The use of microbeams in thin-film analysis will be sketched . In addition, some nuclear techniques using (implanted) radioactive probe nuclei will be shortly described, such as emission channelling, conversion electron Mossbauer spectroscopy and perturbed gamma-ray angular correlation s. Mainly, such examples have been selected where combinations of these ana lysing techniques illustrate their respective power and limitations.