Abstract
In Recent Years there has been an increasing demand for materials of very high purity for uses on an industrial as well as a laboratory scale. This has provided an impetus to the development of analytical methods for the determination of minute quantities of impurities. For example, semiconducting substances containing small controlled amounts of specific trace elements are necessary for transistors, and the production of such materials requires analyses of constituents present at concentrations much lower than one part per million. Neutron-activation analysis has been applied to many such analytical problems and has become an outstanding addition to modern methods for determining trace elements. It is not a new method, for it was first used in 1936 by von Hevesy and Levi for the determination of dysprosium in impure yttrium oxide. However, it is only since the construction of nuclear reactors giving high fluxes of neutrons that neutron activation has become a powerful analytical tool of extreme sensitivity and wide applicability.
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