Possibility of the Discrimination of Different Chemical States by Energy-Dispersive X-Ray Spectroscopy

Abstract

The chemical shift of the characteristic fluorescence X-ray emission line is far smaller than the resolution of a detector widely used in energy-dispersive spectroscopy, such as a Si(Li) detector. The line position measured with this kind of detector greatly depends on many factors. In the present work, an energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy method was introduced to precisely measure the chemical shift of the characteristic X-ray emission line by partitioning the measurement time into many subdivisions with a statistical data-processing procedure. The possibility of this method was also considered theoretically. The chemical state of an element could be identified by using a reference material. The discrimination limit was found to be less than 0.3 eV if electric signal processing could be carefully controlled.