CHEMOMETRICS FOR SURFACE-ANALYSIS

This paper reports about the integration of chemometrics into surface analysis for enlarging the analytical information domain and improving the figures of merit of the techniques applied, mainly secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) and electron probe micro analysis (EPMA). It covers three-dimensional image acquisition, processing and visualization, phase identification via classification of elemental micrographs, correlation of images recorded with complementary analytical techniques and improvement of spectral and spatial resolution with the maximum entropy method. This approach allows to achieve a significant progress in surface analysis and provides a substantially improved potential for materials characterization. It is also a classical example for the growing importance of computer based analytical chemistry (COBAC).