Advances in the development of the PIXEKLM-TPI software package

Complete text of publication follows. During the past decade great effort has been devoted to the developments of various local analytical methods which are capable to analyze small volumes of a sample (in the range of some μm3) by high lateral and/or depth resolution. Among the Ion Beam Analytical (IBA) methods, Particle Induced X-Ray Fluorescence Emission (PIXE) analysis has been used for qualitative elemental imaging for a long time. Nevertheless, production of quantitative images is still a challenging and unresolved problem in general. Ryan and his co-workers were the first who developed a software package (GeoPIXE) for on-line quantitative mapping which is capable to analyze especially thick samples. Some years ago we also started to develop quantitative PIXE imaging software and suggested a different approach for the compensation of matrix effects and sample thickness. It is based on the rapid matrix transform method called Dynamic Analysis which directly converts the spectrum vector (S) into the concentration vector (C) in terms of the matrix Γ. We modified the earlier version of the PIXEKLM program in order to calculate the Γ matrix for materials of any thickness. Furthermore, we have developed a windows-based program (True PIXE Imaging, TPI) which calculates elemental distributions on a pixel by pixel basis and creates so called elemental images from them in bit map form using colour bars. The basic part of the new program package was published in 2005. During the past year much efforts has been devoted to develop various new options such as visualization of spectrum components in order to make the program more user-friendly and applicable. In the figure below the decomposed PIXE spectrum of an industrial material is visualized. (author)