Quantitative Analysis Using Asymmetric Adaptive Pulse Processing

Previous work [1] demonstrated that pulse-by-pulse adaptive digital filtering improves the precision of X-ray quantitative analysis for a given sample electron dose, with no loss of accuracy compared to conventional pulse processing. The improvement stems from better energy resolution compared to short fixed digital filtering for the same throughput. The gain in precision is greatest for small peaks below about 5 keV near to or overlapping with larger peaks, such as Al in NIST K412 glass, which has favorable implications for analysis at low accelerating voltages.