IMPROVEMENT IN THE DETECTION LIMITS OF ELASTIC RECOIL DETECTION ANALYSIS (ERDA) USING A TIME-OF-FLIGHT DETECTION

The detection limits of oxygen and silicon in a SiO2 sample were compa red between a time-of-flight elastic recoil detection analysis (TOF-ER DA) and conventional ERDA using a 41.5 MeV Ar-40 ion beam. With TOF-ER DA, an energy spectrum oi each mass can be extracted by measuring both the flight time and the energy of each recoil particle while conventi onal ERDA provides an overlapped energy spectrum fo all masses. It was found that the oxygen can be detected at areal densities of as low as 6.62 x 10(13) atoms/cm(2) by TOF-ERDA, and that the detection limits can be improved by the factor of 5 compared to conventional ERDA.