This award will partially fund the acquisition of a new electron microprobe for the Electron Microprobe Facility in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at ASU, replacing our 24-year-old JEOL 8600. The new microprobe will provide a significant increase in our ability to chemically characterize microscopic samples, facilitating ongoing NSF and NASA-funded projects in fields such as geology, meteoritics, archaeology, material science, and biology. The new microprobe, with its increased capabilities, will also open up opportunities for novel research directions that are currently inaccessible with the current machine. The Electron Microprobe Facility has been a successful multi-disciplinary analytical facility at ASU for over 40 years, and has a history of strong commitment to undergraduate and graduate student training in micro-analytical techniques. This acquisition will provide broad but critical support for research programs institution-wide, as well as supporting important student training on state-of-the-art analytical equipment used by many commercial industries.
The funding for this project, in addition to funding from the Cosmochemistry program at NASA, was used for the purchase of a new JEOL 8530F field emission gun electron microprobe for the Electron Microprobe Facility at Arizona State University. This purchase replaces an existing, 25 year old, JEOL 8600 Superprobe, and provides a significant increase to state of the art quantitative chemical analytical capability. The purchase was completed June, 2011, and delivery and installation is expected in February, 2012. Renovation of new laboratory space is currently underway at ASU to meet the stringent environmental specifications of the new instrument. Once installed, the new instrument will increase existing capability by providing modern WDS spectrometers that are faster and more precise, field emission gun technology with increased spatial resolution, and modern software for data visualization, storage, and transfer. Currently, the EM Facility at ASU is critical to ASU users and projects from diverse fields including, archaeology, material science, geology, meteoritics, and biology. The facility also has a strong history of training students (both undergraduate and graduate) in micro-analytical techniques and data analysis, and the acquisition of the new machine will ensure that the students are receiving experience and training on a state of the art instrument.
