Hello, all! I am trying to promote the use of our fabulous JEOL 8200 for in-situ enthusiasts among the apatite+zircon+rutile crowd by providing 'searchmaps' that I was first exposed to at UMass looking for monazites. I am sure that this is quite common: running very quick, coarse stage maps over the whole section with the spectrometers tuned to the characteristic element of each mineral; then the few bright pixels on the Zr, P, and Ti maps can be overlain onto the BSE and bonus Si/Al/Ca maps from the spare spectrometers for context and navigation. I particularly love doing these, because then the user has a whole suite of spatial data stimulating future investigations that they may have otherwise never noticed!
Since the quicker we can do these maps the more attractive it is, I've been trying to figure out what exactly I can get away with in terms of stage speed. PI thinks that the minimum dwell time for a 20 micron step is 3 ms and a 50 micron step is 4 ms, which I am deeply impressed by. In practice though, I've noticed that maps seem to take about 1.5-1.6 times longer than PI predicts, and my automated runs are occasionally killed at 1am by a JEOL -206 'floating point' error that may or may not be related (JEOL is getting back to me).
It all has me wondering what other folks do for these sorts of applications, what sort of speeds are typically possible, and if I can make some improvements to this method. If anyone would like to share any tips or alternate approaches, I would love to hear them!
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