Time of flight elastic recoil detection for thin film analysis

Time-of-flight elastic recoil detection (TOF-ERD) is a powerful and complimentary technique to Rutherford Backscattering Spectrometry (RBS) for elemental analysis in surfaces and thin films. Its main advantages lie in its capability of not only simultaneously depth profiling light elements (3Pelletron® Accelerator at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Initial results on varying-thickness carbon thin foils using MeV gold ion beams yielded a depth resolution of approximately 3.8 nm. TOF-ERD computer software written on site to simulate spectra and to convert time spectra into depth profiles is also presented.