SPI Supplies® Brand Diamond Grids and Diamond Planchets
Bremsstrahlung radiation
Introduction:
Bremsstrahlung radiation is often times called the "continuum" of a spectrum, or the "background" of the
spectrum, but in any case, it tends to erode the signal-to-noise situation. Higher background radiation
is undesirable and lower background radiation is always desirable, since the signal-to-noise ratio improves.
Our objective here is to give our customers, not necessarily a broad based theoretical understanding of the
phenomenon, but a practical understanding, so that they will have some appreciation of the strategies needed
in order to reduce the detrimental effects of high background radiation in their data.
The origins of Bremsstrahlung radiation:
Bremsstrahlung radiation is generated whenever a charged particle is accelerated. The continuum portion of
a spectrum is also often referred to as Bremsstrahlung.
For reasons that seem to not be fully understood (or easily explained), in an EDS (or WDS) spectrum, the
background levels of (or Bremsstrahlung) radiation are very high for carbon generally, especially, for
"carbon" (which are really graphite) mounts, and the various
double sided conductive carbon adhesive products, and
"carbon" paint. Yet for diamond, such as for our
Diamond Planchets, the background level of radiation is very low,
and is comparable to the low level characteristic for beryllium.
Beryllium planchets have always been popular substrates for EDS work because of the very low (in comparison to carbon)
levels of Bremsstrahlung radiation. But now it has been shown that carbon, in the form of diamond, exhibits a low
level of background radiation comparable to that which is observed for beryllium.
Therefore, when one is doing EDS in a TEM, and are using diamond grids
(as opposed to Nylon grids, for example), or EDS in any SEM, are using
the SPI Supplies® Brand of diamond planchets, there
will be greatly reduced levels of Bremsstrahlung radiation, and therefore an increase in sensitivity and detection
limits because of the vast improvement in signal to noise.
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Wednesday February 08, 2012
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