X-ray Spectrographic Determination of Strontium

Abstract

ROBERTS¹ recently described an X-ray fluorescence Spectrographic method for the determination of strontium in animal bone using the Philips PW 1520 spectrograph fitted with a quartz analysing crystal. In our laboratories a lithium fluoride crystal was available and was used for similar analyses since, compared with a quartz crystal, it increases the intensity of the strontium Kα line by a factor of 2.8 and the line/background ratio by a factor of 1.15. Thus the counting time to achieve a given coefficient of variation (due to the counting statistics) can be reduced by a factor of 3.5 or, if the same counting time is compared, the coefficient of variation can be reduced by a factor of 1.9, by using the lithium fluoride crystal.