[14p-4E-1~21] 7.6 Ion beams

[14p-4E-13] Highly sensitive hydrogen detection for metal surfaces
by medium energy Ne⁺ impact

〇(PC)Kei Mitsuhara¹, Yasukazu Yamamoto¹, Yoshiaki Kido² (1.Ritsumeikan Univ. SR, 2.Ritsumeikan Univ.)

Keywords:Hydrogen,ERDA,Ne

It is well known that hydrogen affects the properties of various kinds of materials such as hydrogen embrittlement. Recently, hydrogen storage has attracted much attention for application to automobile driving with fuel cells. There are a variety of methods to detect hydrogen proposed so far, such as secondary ion mass spectrometry(SIMS), elastic recoil detection analysis(ERDA) and induction coupled plasma(ICP). Unfortunately, the sensitivity to hydrogen is not so high because of significant background levels. In this study, we show that medium energy Ne⁺ impact gives an excellent sensitivity to H on metal surfaces. The reason for the high sensitivity to hydrogen is simply explained by the fact that the H⁺ fraction is much larger than the Ne⁺ fraction as well as the fractions of singly ionized substrate atoms recoiled from the surfaces.