Oxygen-bearing minerals are generally strong insulators (e.g. silicates), or if not (e.g. transition metal oxides), they are included within a rock matrix which electrically isolates them from the sample holder contacts. In this respect, a thin carbon layer (150 Å in our laboratory) is evaporated on the sections in order to restore the conductivity. For silicates, overestimated oxygen concentrations are usually noted when transition metal oxides are used as standards. These trends corroborate the results of Bastin and Heijligers on MgO, Al2O3 and SiO2. According to our experiments, these errors are independent of the accelerating voltage used (fig.l).Owing to the low density of preexisting defects within the Al2O3 single-crystal, no significant charge buildup occurs under irradiation at low accelerating voltage (< 10keV). As a consequence, neither beam instabilities, due to electrical discharges within the excited volume, nor losses of energy for beam electrons before striking the sample, due to the presence of the electrostatic charge-induced potential, are noted : measurements from both coated and uncoated samples give comparable results which demonstrates that the carbon coating is not the cause of the observed errors.
