Facility Support: The Arizona State University SIMS Laboratories

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

This award will renew support for the Arizona State University Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer (SIMS) Facility. Arizona State University has long been a leader in SIMS research and development and is known for cross-disciplinary collaborations; renewing this national facility allows this group to continue to share their expertise with the broader Earth Science community. As part of the annual public outreach efforts of the facility, a SIMS workshop is offered that attracts ~15 visitors (dominantly students with women representing ~50% of attendees) for an intense, 3-day immersion in the instrumentation with lectures and hands-on practical experience in sample preparation and analysis. Of the five senior personnel in this proposal, three are women, and two are early-career scientists. The facility will synthesize and characterize relevant chemical and isotopic standard materials, which will be disseminated to other SIMS laboratories to enhance scientific understanding and collaboration. The facility will be used primarily for light element geochemistry: analysis of H in nominally anhydrous minerals, Li and B concentration and isotope measurements in a range of silicate minerals and glass, hydrogen, deuterium, and carbon in silicate glasses, and F contents of minerals and volcanic glass. However, many users have successfully obtained analyses for heavier elements in trace abundance, such as Rb to Nb, REE, Hf, Th, and U. Point analyses and depth-profiling studies will continue to be emphasized. In adding the NanoSIMS to the facility, it will become the first open facility offering access to NanoSIMS for the analyses of terrestrial materials. Renewed funding will allow novel applications of NanoSIMS to previously under-explored applications in the Earth Sciences, such as characterizing zoning in trace elements and isotopic concentrations at the sub-micron scale to elucidate the timing of geologic events. New techniques will be developed based on their interaction with visitors as the facility scientists strive to provide the chemical data needed to advance their science.