Study of the Composition of Products of Controlled Nucleosynthesis by Local Auger-electron Spectroscopy

By local Auger-electron spectroscopy on solid targets and accumulating screens, we studied the composition of nucleosynthesis products, in which we expected to reveal the presence of long-lived transuranium elements (LTE). The goal of the work was to find LTE on the surface of the specimens under investigation. The specificity of the surface composition determination consisted in that the registered spectra included usually the Auger-peaks of a lot of chemical elements, which poses major difficulties in their identification. To solve the latter problem, we used a wide range of energies (from 30 to 3000 eV) with the purpose to cover a maximum number of series of the Auger-peaks of analyzed elements and long exposures (up to 3 h) to reveal Auger-peaks with small intensity. In a number of cases for analyzed elements in complicated spectra the Auger-spectra of corresponding pure elements or their simple compounds were registered with a high signal-to-noise ratio. As artifacts of the analysis, we consider such phenomena as the electric charging, characteristic losses of energy, and chemical shift. On the study of the surface of specimens, we found the unidentifiable Auger-peaks with energies of 172, 527, 1096, 94, and 560 eV and the doublet of peaks with energies of 130 and 115 eV. We failed to refer them to any Auger-peaks of chemical elements in the atlases and catalogs or to any artifacts. As one of the variants of interpretation of the revealed peaks, we consider the assumption about their affiliation to LTE.