Recent trends in quantitative aspects of microscopic X-ray fluorescence analysis

Micro X-ray fluorescence analysis (mu-XRF) is one of the newest branches of XRF, which has developed very rapidly since 1990. In this review, we first discuss a number of papers that describe advances in instrumentation and (calibration) methods that can contribute towards more reliable quantitative analysis using mu-XRF. This first part also includes recent papers that aim to characterize the heterogeneity of standards useful for calibrating mu-XRF set-ups. We then present a short overview of recently published papers in which the (semi-)quantitative nature of mu-XRF is exploited, including studies in which mu-XRF is compared to other microanalytical methods providing compositional information or is used in combination with other methods in order to characterize materials more completely. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.