Analysis of boron by charged particle bombardment

The determination of boron concentration in thin films, semiconductors or other materials requires techniques providing good depth resolution and high sensitivities. For this purpose nuclear analysis techniques can be powerful tools and this paper presents a review of the nuclear reactions essentially with charged particles (p, α, d) that have been used (including charge particle activation analysis). Irradiation with neutrons is also considered, in particular with the very sensitive 10B(n,α)7Li reaction due to the strong absorption of neutrons by boron. With the aim to search for reactions producing better depth resolutions, elastic recoil detection based techniques (ERDA, ERCS) on boron are discussed. The performances of these nuclear reactions are compared with other methods, in particular with SIMS, AES, XPS and, using recent developments, the electronic microprobe. (orig.)