Raman microspectroscopy: a non-destructive tool for routine calibration of apatite crystallographic structure for fission-track analyses

Compositional control on the annealing kinetics of fission-tracks (FT) in apatite requires routine measurement of sample grain composition. However, for practical reasons the bulk composition of analysed grains is not routinely measured and instead grain chlorine content or etch-pit dimensions are used to characterise a samples annealing behaviour. A more desirable approach is to measure crystallographic parameters (i.e. unit cell dimension) of a grain as these represent the summed effect of all substitutions and crystal defects. We show how Raman microspectrometry can be used as a routine non-destructive tool to obtain rapid measurement of the crystallographic structure of apatite grains etched for FT analysis. Variations of unit cell parameter a are found to correspond to a systematic variation of Raman shift in the range of 452–440 cm−1 for measurements made on c-parallel sections of apatite where the direction of the polarized incident beam is parallel to the c axis.