Characterisation of rare earth minerals with field emission scanning electron microscopy

Rare earth elements are becoming increasingly in demand, due to their prevalence in both renewable energy devices and high end electronics. The characterisation of the composition and morphology of the various phases that have valuable rare earth elements in the ores are needed in conjunction with the study of their physicochemical properties to optimise industrial process to extract the minerals containing the rare earth elements. Rare earth bearing minerals contain many elements with overlapping X-ray peaks (L- and M-lines) with an energy dispersive spectrometry detector, requiring a high degree of X-ray energy resolution. A program was developed to obtain the intensity of each peak by deconvolution of the X-ray spectrum. Low accelerating voltage of less than 5 kV and small beam diameter of less than 10 nm of a cold field emission scanning electron microscope allow x-ray microanalysis on the nanometre scale. A 100 nm wide phase was observed at 4 kV on a backscattered electron micrograph. Furthermore, a small beam diameter of less than 10 nm was used for identification of small phases of a few micrometres.