Study of LEAP® 5000 Deadtime and Precision via Silicon Pre-Sharpened-Microtip™ Standard Specimens

Abstract

Atom probe tomography (APT) is a technique that has expanded significantly in terms of adoption, dataset size, and quality during the past 15 years. The sophistication used to ensure ultimate analysis precision has not kept pace. The earliest APT datasets were small enough that deadtime and background considerations for processing mass spectrum peaks were secondary. Today, datasets can reach beyond a billion atoms so that high precision data processing procedures and corrections need to be considered to attain reliable accuracy at the parts-per-million level. This paper considers options for mass spectrum ranging, deadtime corrections, and error propagation as applied to an extrinsic-silicon standard specimen to attain agreement for silicon isotopic fraction measurements across multiple instruments, instrument types, and acquisition conditions. Precision consistent with those predicted by counting statistics is attained showing agreement in silicon isotope fraction measurements across multiple instruments, instrument platforms, and analysis conditions.

Atom Probe Tomography for Isotopic Analysis: Development of the 34S/32S System in Sulfides

“…Prior work has demonstrated the ion data recorded in the IVAS Cal/Recon Wizard corrected-TOF spectrum can differ significantly from that recorded in the *.ePOS file, and the most accurate isotopic analysis results were achieved by employing a consistent analysis methodology on the single-hit corrected-TOF data (Meisenkothen et al, 2020a(Meisenkothen et al, , 2020b(Meisenkothen et al, , 2020c. Similarly, for silicon specimens of natural isotopic abundance, Prosa & Oltman (2021) have reported their most accurate isotopic analysis results were obtained with non-default RHIT files that had been generated without prompt ion feedback filtering of multi-hit events and by using consistent automated ranging strategies.…”

Isotopic Correction of Compositional Inaccuracies in the Atom Probe Analysis of LaB6

“…It should be noted that several researchers ,,,− have proposed correction approaches, mostly based on isotopic frequencies, to explain the compositional biases obtained in APT. The main difference between our method and other proposals is the use of pseudomultiples.…”