Effects of internal bremsstrahlung of tritium β-decay and surface roughness in the BIXS method

We have studied the effects of the internal bremsstrahlung of tritium β-decay, sample surface roughness and tritium content as well on the tritium β-decay induced X-ray spectroscopy (BIXS) for tritium measurements based on Monte Carlo simulations. The Knipp-Uhlenbeck-Bloch theoretical model was adopted for the internal bremsstrahlung. It is found that the contributions of internal bremsstrahlung of tritium β-decays are approximately 30%, 10%, 4% and 2% of the corresponding external bremsstrahlung for C, Ti, Mo and W materials, respectively, and the sample surface roughness may cause an error of several percent in the BIXS method if the surface roughness of a sample is in a reasonable range. Moreover, the effect of tritium content should be taken into account when a sample contains a large amount of tritium, otherwise, the tritium contents measured by the BIXS method will be underestimated, for example, by up to ∼15% for Ti metal.