Analytische Chemie
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Innovative material with outstanding physical and chemical properties are produced upon the deposition of thin and ultrathin coatings on different substrates. For instance, hard disks able to store Tera-bytes of information are based on the deposition of multiple nano-layers, which include magnetic and non-magnetic layers. Many other analogous examples, including photovoltaic cells, coated Al substrates, oxidized thin film composite membranes, coated glasses, coated polymers, etc. could be cited. The physical performance of these emerging materials is directly related to their chemical properties, including the elemental distribution within the different layers and at the layer-interfaces, or the presence of critical non-desired trace elements. Therefore, quality control and R+D advances require the development of direct solid analytical techniques able to provide fast multi-elemental chemical analysis of these materials, with high depth resolution (to monitor the different layers) and high sensitivity (to detect major, minor and trace elements).
Atomic spectrometry techniques have long been used for direct elemental chemical characterization. Techniques, such as Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry or Auger Electron Spectroscopy provide very valuable information about the chemical composition of the surfaces/coatings; however, they also have some major drawbacks, such as high operating costs, complex sample pre-treatment and handling, low sample throughput and/or severe matrix effects that result in difficult quantification procedures. To overcome some of these drawbacks Glow Discharge Mass Spectroscopy is proposed as a complementary methodology that provides an ideal solution for fast and accurate bulk and layer analyses. In this work, we evaluate the advantages and limitations of this technique and we discuss about recent progresses and new applications.
Fire-gilding is a historic technique for the application of golden layers on a number of different base materials utilizing a gold amalgam. This technique leaves a significant amount of Hg in the golden layer, giving archeometrists a reliable indicator to identify firegildings.
Recent findings on presumably fire-gilded objects have shown in several cases significantly lower Hg content than previously studied objects. This prompted a synchrotron-based X-ray fluorescence investigation into the Hg distribution along the material–gilding interface, as well as a series of measurements regarding the Hg content development in fire-gilded samples during artificial aging. This work presents findings on laboratory-prepared fire-gildings, indicating an Hg enrichment at the interface of firegilded silver samples. Notably, such an enrichment is missing in fire-gilded copper samples. Further, it is confirmed that fire-gilded layers typically do not undercut an Hg bulk content of 5%. In this light, it seems improbable that ancient samples that contain <5% Hg are fire-gilded. The results presented in this study might lead to a non-destructive method to identify the Hg enrichment at the interface. This might be obtained by a combination of different non-destructive measurements and might also work unambiguously in samples in which the gold top layer is altered.