Alkali Containing Molecular Ions in SIMS: A Cutting-Edge Ion-Beam Technique for Materials Quantification in Nanoscale Systems

Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS) is an extremely powerful and sensitive ion-beam technique for detection and quantification in materials. Extent of secondary ions of a specific species in a sample sturdily depends on instantaneous local surface chemistry of that sample causing a strong variation in ionization cross section of the emitted species. This is so-called “Matrix Effect”, which makes the SIMS technique challenging for quantitative analysis of materials, even though the technique has highest detection sensitivity (