Design of Absorbers for Metal-rich Samples in PIXE Analysis (Application of PIXE to various research fields at NMCC)

About 40 subjects of PIXE have been studied in various research fields at Nishina Memorial Cyclotron Center (NMCC), and many satisfactory results have been obtained and reported. As the results, samples to be analyzed are highly diversified both in form and in elemental composition. Among them, samples most hard to be dealt with by PIXE are ones which contain a great quantity of specific elements. In order to solve this problem, we have developed and tried various absorbers which are specially designed for each kind of sample and are capable of decreasing some distinguished x-ray peak and making x-ray spectra gentle-sloping. It is found that not only the measuring time is fairly shortened but also highly sensitive and highly accurate analysis can be performed for each sample only by selecting absorbers.