Recent technical developments of non-invasive cultural heritage analysis at the University of Liège

The University of Liège has more than twenty years of experience in the use of ion beam analysis techniques for cultural heritage research. We will present here some of the recent developments. First, we have developed a high energy extracted beamline up to 20 MeV on our cyclotron with a good energy resolution of a few keV. These last years Ion Beam Analysis users show an interest in High Energy Alpha beam. These beams can be used for on-site analysis by means of radioactive sources e.g. for space application but they also offer a powerful combination of properties for the analysis of thick layers (about 10 to 20 µm). This kind of layers are often met in cultural heritage applications but can be also present on new materials. Contrary to this kind of materials where the principal information needed is the in-depth profiles as the sample are of known composition, for cultural heritage materials the combination of elemental analysis and their in-depth distribution is essential as the nature of the material is a-priori not known. We will also present the development around our first extracted beamline. We have indeed improved the automatic scanning system for macro-PIXE. Some examples will be shown. Finally we will show other non-invasive analysis developments related to cultural heritage.