1. Main interactions used

1.1 Ion-matter interactions

Nuclear microprobe analysis uses the same incident ions (mainly protons, deuterons and 3 and 4 helions) and the same detections as analysis with conventionally-sized charged particle beams, such as for charged particle-induced X-ray emission. and for elastic collisions and nuclear reactions . However, the nuclear microprobe offers finer lateral localization possibilities, directly linked to the size of the beam, giving access to the quantitative distribution of elements in three dimensions on a micrometric scale. It also brings additional constraints due to the high local densities of incident particles that need to be generated and imposed on the samples to obtain an exploitable signal. This ability to locally deposit...