Measurement of fluorine by heavy ion PIXE

We aimed to measure the fluorine concentration by using SiriusSD X-ray detector that has good detecting efficiencies for light elements down to carbon. Usually a thin foil is located in front of the detector to absorb low energy X-rays and to prevent the scattered ions from entering the detector. The energy of fluorine characteristic X-ray is only 0.6 keV and it attenuates easily even in a thin foil. We considered using heavy ion projectile to reduce the amount of backscattered ion remarkably. We used a 8.5 MeV O⁴⁺ beam and succeeded to detect fluorine X-rays. (author)