ABSTRACT
Edge quantification requires the determination of the intensity due to solely the ionization events. This is achieved by the subtraction of the continuously decreasing background component from the edge signal of each element of interest. All core loss edges lie on a background composed of the tails of the plasmon excitation(s) plus those from ionization edges with lower threshold energies. In high-energy regions away from the low loss regime where the plasmon contribution is dominant, and sufficiently beyond any other edge threshold, there is an approximately linear relationship between the logarithm of the intensity and the logarithm of the energy loss. The quantity of most relevance in high spatial resolution microanalysis is the minimum detectable mass of a particular element, which depends critically on the electron probe size and probe current. The quantity of most relevance in high spatial resolution microanalysis is the minimum detectable mass of a particular element,.
