The electron range and x-ray production for a given beam energy and atomic number is one of the most valuable piece of information a microscopist must have before carrying out qualitative and quantitative analysis on heterogeneous samples in a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Initial experiments by Kanter & Sternglass [1] and Cosslett & Thomas [2] show that the electron range, when expressed in mass thickness units (ρR), depends only lightly on the atomic number (Z) of the material. However,

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... some experiments (Al-Ahmad & Watt [3]) found an increase in the electron range with the atomic number. At low energy (E o < 5 keV), because of the very limited electron range (< 40 nm for Al at 1 keV), experimental measurements are strongly affected by the surface condition and contamination making them very hard to perform. In addition, the frequently used parametrization of Kanaya & Okayama [4] is only « valid » at high energy (E o > 10 keV). In this work, the CASINO Monte Carlo program 5 , specially designed for low energy simulation, was used to compute the electron range for 10 elements at 20 different energies. The parameterization of the electron range at low energy as a function of atomic number and beam energy will be presented for x-ray production as well as for backscattered and internal electrons.