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Abstract Uranium-Pb and Hf isotopic analysis of zircon crystals provides a crystallisation age and origin of the mineral, critical information to investigate Earth’s history. Zircon geochemistry can vary over micrometre scales; therefore, natural reference materials that are used for zircon analyses need to be well characterised before valid measurements can be acquired for ‘unknowns’. This study aimed to assess U-Th-Pb isotope, Hf isotope and trace element heterogeneity of four widely use...

Quartz is abundant in the Earth's continental crust and persistent throughout the geological record. Trace element signatures in silica minerals can be used to infer processes operating in magmatic and hydrothermal systems. Conventional analyses of trace elements in silica minerals are limited by either spatial or mass resolution [e.g., wavelength-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, micro-X-ray fluorescence, laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS), and secondary i...

Time-of-Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) is an analytical technique developed in the 1980s and has since then been....