Quantification of organic materials by ion implantation

Secondary ion mass spectrometry was initially considered to be a semiquantitative technique because of as much as 5 orders of magnitude variation in secondary ion yields over the periodic table for oxygen and cesium bombardment. The use of ion implantation to create standards has made it possible to accurately quantify elements and isotopes in a wide range of inorganic materials. The development of new ion sources has extended depth profiling to organic materials. It is of interest to explore ion implantation to quantify elements and molecular species in organic substrates. It is unrealistic to ion implant an organic molecule. Even if the molecular species was formed into a charged beam, the species will disintegrate upon impact with the substrate. However, if the species of interest contains an element not present in the substrate, then it should be possible to implant that element into the substrate and make a quantitative determination. In recent work, the authors demonstrated quantification of the ins...