Correction of dead time effects in laser-induced desorption time-of-flight mass spectrometry: Applications in atom probe tomography

Dead time effects in time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry are well known and can be corrected for using Poisson statistics. Laser-induced desorption, however, introduces nonlinearity in the evaporation process resulting in highly fluctuating signals that make proper dead time correction much more challenging. Here, we propose a modified dead time correction procedure that overcomes such obstacles using data from correlated detection events from different isotopes of a single element. Provided the signals are not affected by unresolved mass interferences, this dead time correction enables us to obtain meaningful isotope ratios as demonstrated for atom probe tomography data of carbon from nanodiamonds and of silicon.