A procedure to correct for target thickness effects in heavy-ion PIXE at MeV energies

We describe a novel procedure for the calculation of correction factors for taking into account the effect of target thickness to be applied to the determination of cross sections of X-ray emission induced by heavy ions at MeV energies. We discuss the origin of the correction and describe the calculations, based on simple polynomial fits of both the theoretical cross sections and the ion energy losses. The procedure can be easily implemented. We show several examples for a set of targets specifically produced for cross section measurements and for various combinations of ion type and energy.