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Article

Characterizing Complex Mineral Structures in Thin Section of Geological Sample with a Scanning Hall Effect Microscope

Submitted:

13 March 2019

Posted:

15 March 2019

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Abstract
We improved a magnetic scanning microscope for measuring the magnetic properties of minerals in thin sections of geological samples at submillimeter scales. The microscope is comprised of a 200 µm diameter Hall sensor that is 142 µm from the sample; an electromagnet capable of applying to the sample up to 500 mT dc magnetic fields over a 40 mm diameter region; a second Hall sensor arranged in a gradiometric configuration to cancel the background signal applied by the electromagnet and reduce overall noise in the system; a custom-designed electronics to bias the sensors and provide adjustment for background signal cancelation; and a scanning XY stage with micrometer resolution. Our system achieves a spatial resolution of 220 µm with noise at 6.0 Hz of »300 nTrms/(Hz)1/2 in an unshielded environment. The magnetic moment sensitivity is 1.3 × 10−11 Am2.1/2 We successfully measured the representative magnetization of a geological sample using an alternative model that takes into account the sample geometry and identified different micrometric characteristics in the sample slice.
Keywords: 
magnetic scanning microscope; hall sensor; magnetic materials; geological sample
Subject: 
Physical Sciences  -   Applied Physics
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.

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