Recipe for fabricating zeolite ion source for plasma probing

Alkali zeolite is often used as an ion source material owing to its easy extraction of alkali ions. In our laboratory, we fabricated zeolite containing a particular alkali species through a replacement reaction with sodium zeolite. In this paper, we present a simple mathematical model for describing this replacement reaction for making zeolite containing a particular alkali species. In this model, the fraction of alkali ions trapped in the zeolite lattice is expressed as a function of the numbers of substitution reactions in a concise recursion formula. This formula gives a simple estimation of efficiency for fabricating alkali zeolite in terms of the consumptions of time and chemicals.