Philippe Pinard, Hendrix Demers and I recently noticed that the x-ray intensities calculated from using a few of the pure element PAR files in the Standard GUI for Penefluor/Fanal were not correct.  This was only the case for the gaseous elements: N, O, F, Ne, Cl, Ar, Kr, Xe and Rn.  Now I don't suppose that many of you actually utilize pure gases as standards, even for your simulations, but we discovered the issue while writing up a paper on the use of alpha factors from Monte Carlo generated intensities

This was because I had assumed the room temperature densities for calculating the material files for these gaseous elements (if we had evolved on Pluto this would not have been an issue!).   

The gaseous densities (~10^-3) were problematic because the default "bulk" geometry file (bulk.geo), specifies a thickness of only 0.1 cm or 1 mm. This makes these gaseous pure elements essentially a thin film experiment where some of the incident electrons actually transmit through the specimen geometry resulting in too low a generated x-ray intensity!  Our solution was to simply force the pure gaseous element densities to 1.0 if they were less than 1.0.  Obviously you can modify the densities from the GUI to whatever values you want and re-calculate them, and/or edit the bulk.geo file geometry, if you prefer.

So we re-calculated these gaseous pure elements (N, O, F, Ne, Cl, Ar, Kr, Xe and Rn) and they are now available for download by using the Help | Update menu in either CalcZAF or Probe for EPMA, by checking the Update Penepma Monte Carlo Files as seen here:



Remember, if you haven't updated CalcZAF and/or Probe for EPMA since we switched to secure https connections in August this year, you will need to manually download the CalcZAF.msi and/or ProbeForEPMA.msi installers on this page:

https://probesoftware.com/Update.html

and run the installer manually once.  After this, you can continue to update CalcZAF and/or Probe for EPMA from the Help | Update menu again.

Or you can manually download the Penepma12.zip file from the various download sites if you prefer and unzip it to your user data folder (usually C:\UserData\Penepma12). The actual pure element PAR files are in the \Penfluor\Pure sub folder.

Hi Anne,

Sounds a good method!

They have various sample prep methods on the Univeristy of Edinburgh Ion Probe website

https://www.ed.ac.uk/geosciences/facilities/ionprobe/technical/examples-of-sample-preparations

and

https://www.ed.ac.uk/geosciences/facilities/ionprobe/technical/prep

Ben

I've attached an image with the network setup of our 8530F Plus system. We have 4 PCs: 1 for JEOL software, 1 for Thermo Pathfinder EDS, 1 for JEOL xCLent CL, and 1 for Probe Software.

We used to only have 3 PCs, with Thermo and Probe Software sharing a PC, but we had some issues with Thermo on that PC (unrelated to the two sharing the PC) that were probably hardware related. The easiest was to build a new PC for Thermo from scratch and we just kept the existing PC as it was for Probe Software.

All PCs have at least 2 network ports, 1 for external communication (within the university and internet) and one for a dedicated internal network through a Netgear gigabit switch for file sharing, keyboard/mouse sharing, and JEOL EIKS "SEM" communication. The JEOL PC and Probe Software PC each have a third network port connected to the JEOL hub in the console under the desk for microprobe hardware communication. The Thermo PC has a third network port to communicate with the Thermo hardware.

The screen layout, KM sharing etc with photos are shown in this post here:
http://probesoftware.com/smf/index.php?topic=1057.msg6968#msg6968

Cheers,
Karsten

Related to Ben's request above we've modified the code to automatically select the proper sample output type (standard vs. unknown) when the user right clicks the selected sample list in the Analyze! window for the "User Specified Output Format" as seen here:



This enables the output of "published" concentration (and variance and difference) values for standards if standard samples were selected.

Thanks for doing that

Ben

Owen Neill was recently running PictureSnapApp on his JEOL SEM (more on this later) and really likes the option to disable the Z axis for stage motion when navigating the sample. This is for when using a three point image calibration (so the image is also calibrated in Z), and the Z axis sample heights vary a lot.

He suggested that I add the same option to the PictureSnap feature in Probe for EPMA. So here it is:



Update PFE from the Help menu.