  A position-energy-sensitive detector has been developed for APT instruments
in order to deal with some mass peak overlap issues encountered in APT
experiments. Through this new type of detector, quantitative and qualitative
improvements could be considered for critical materials introducing mass peak
overlaps, such as nitrogen and silicon in TiSiN systems, or titanium and carbon
in cemented carbide materials. This new detector is based on a thin carbon foil
positioned on the front panel of a conventional MCP-DLD detector. According to
several studies, it has been demonstrated that the impact of ions on thin
carbon foils has the effect of generating a number of transmitted and reflected
secondary electrons that mainly depends on both the kinetic energy and the mass
of incident particles. Despite the fact that this phenomenon is well known and
has been widely discussed for decades, no studies have been performed to date
for using it as a mean to discriminate particles energy. Therefore, this study
introduces the first experiments on a potential new generation of APT detectors
that would be able to resolve mass peak overlaps through the energy-sensitivity
of thin carbon foils.
