Acquiring a SIMS Depth Profile

To find out more about depth profiles, click here.

Note: For UTI SIMS systems, analyzer, gating, and polarity functions must be controlled manually, so you need to adjust your procedure for acquiring data accordingly. Note, however, that AugerScan will still record and display the values placed in these fields so you can use them for bookkeeping.

AugerScan allows you two methods to determine the mass about which you will acquire – either by sitting on a single peak, or acquiring over a survey range. This option can be selecting in the Acquisitions / Options dialog.

  1. Set the AES elastic peak if you have changed or moved the sample. Click here to see the procedure for acquiring an elastic peak.

  2. Make sure that SIMS is selected as the acquisition technique.

  3. If you are using an analog multiplier supply such as the model 20-075, you must set the multiplier voltage before acquiring a depth profile. This voltage is determined by increasing the voltage on the 20-075 SIMS multiplier until no further increase in counts is noted.

  4. Select the New Depth Profile command from the Acquisition menu.

  5. In the Select Element dialog box, click on the elements for which you want to acquire the depth profile. (If the element you want isn’t in the list, click on the New Element button to add the element to the list.) Click on OK to close the Select Element dialog box.

  6. Define the acquisition settings in the Depth Profile Settings dialog box. Note: If you didn’t include all the elements you wanted to in the previous step, click on the Add button in this dialog box. Use the What’s This Help to determine the appropriate values for each field.

  7. Click on the Acquire command button to begin acquiring the depth profile.

  8. Once your depth profile is displayed, you can expand the X-axis scale if necessary. You can also view individual regions and cycles .

Once you’ve acquired the depth profile, you can continue working with the data, thereby “transforming” it. This includes smoothing, differentiating, tracking and marking, annotating, and calculating atomic concentrations. Click here for more information about raw and transformed data. We recommend that you save your data before you transform it in any way because some operations result in permanent changes to the data that cannot be undone.

Click here to see a list of related topics.