Fluorescence suppression

MYTHEN2 detectors provide an adjustable lower energy threshold, which can be used to suppress sample fluorescence. The fluorescent background often swamps weak signals and impairs the signal-to-noise ratio of the data. When the energy threshold of the detector is set higher than the fluorescent energy, this background is effectively suppressed. By setting the energy threshold to 6.8 keV, fast and accurate measurements of Ti-containing samples can be carried out with a standard Cu-tube (Fig.1.).

Figure 1: Comparison of data collected on Ti powder using Cu tube and (a) the MYTHEN2 detector applying fluorescence suppression over 8 s and (b) a previous state-of-the-art detector over 200 s.