Preparation of reference glasses for in-situ analysis of lithium and boron

In recent years there has been an increasing number of applications of micro-analytical techniques, such as Secondary-Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS) and Laser Ablation-ICP-MS, in the field of Earth Sciences. As a consequence, the need of well characterised calibration standards, which are a prerequisite for these techniques, has increased considerably. Such a request is particularly critical to SIMS due to the existence of matrix effects in the ion micro-probe analysis.