The SIMS laboratory in Pavia, Italy
by Luisa Ottolini
The SIMS lab. in Pavia was born in 1985 in the frame of the National Project: An ion microprobe for Advanced Researches in the Earth Sciences. It was funded by the Earth Science Committee (05) of the Italian Research Council (CNR) and was located at "Centro di Studio per la Cristallografia Strutturale" in the Institute of Mineralogy, nearby the Physics and Chemistry Departments. In 1993 the host Centre became "Centro di Studio per la Cristallochimica e Cristallografia" and was moved to the new Earth Science Department, grown in the expanding scientific area of the Pavia University, close to Medical and Engineering Depts.
Since 2001, as a result of the CNR Reform, the Centre in Pavia has been a Section of the Institute for Geosciences and Georesources (IGG) housed in Pisa (www.igg.cnr.it).
The SIMS lab. was created with the enthusiastic support of Giuseppe Rossi, at that time, head of the Centre. He accepted to activate a SIMS lab. aiming at complementing the more traditional crystallographic instrumentation, already available in the Centre, for the study of rock-forming minerals, thus providing with a new approach for in-situ trace-element investigations, fundamental in modern geochemical and petrologic work.
I had the pleasure to work with him during the set up of the SIMS lab. and related facilities up to the presentation of the lab. itself on the Spring Meeting of the Italian Society for Mineralogy and Petrology (SIMP) held in Pavia on 1-2 June 1988. On that occasion we officially started the Italian SIMS "enterprise", armed with one of the earliest ion microprobe (Cameca IMS 4F) installed in Italy, so far the only one devoted to Earth Sciences.
Unfortunately, G. Rossi passed away at the beginning of 1989. He could not harvest the fruits of his efforts in the new facility that he had so strongly supported.
Our initiation to SIMS in the Earth Sciences began with my stage by Ernst Zinner at Lab. for Space Science, Washington Univ. (St. Louis, Missouri), that was focused on the quantitative aspects of the technique. It was followed by a collaborative work with Nobu Shimizu (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institutions, Massachusetts) on the use and potentialities of SIMS for the microanalysis of trace elements in petrogenetic modelling.
Differently from other similar European and worldwide facilities, the SIMS group in Pavia has been and is indeed very small in terms of number of researchers dedicated to SIMS developments and applications. Nevertheless, over these years it showed to be active in several research programs studying a considerable array of scientific problems, spanning analytical chemistry, geochemistry, crystal chemistry and petrology.
During the decade 1990-2000, the SIMS lab. carried out micro-analytical service for the Italian Earth Science community, on the basis of research projects submitted and evaluated by a National SIMS Committee, for a total of 90 projects.
Over these decades, many collaborative researches have been carried out with Italian (CNR and University) groups and foreign institutions. The results of some of them can be viewed on the various pages of this link.