  We conducted an inter-laboratory study of a metallic glass whose main
component is nickel. Two determinations of the mass fractions of the different
elements present within the sample were asked to the participants: one at an
acceleration voltage of 15 or 20 kV and another one at 5 kV. We compare the
mass fractions obtained from wavelength dispersive (WDS) and energy dispersive
spectrometries (EDS) and also try to find an influence of the kind of EDS
detector and its entrance window, the background subtraction method, the use or
not of standards as well as the quantification method. Both means of WDS and
EDS mass fractions are close to the reference values. The dispersion of the
results was larger at 5 kV than at 15-20 kV owing to the use of the L lines
rather than K lines and to the lowest collected intensities. There is an
exception with the case of boron because at the lowest voltage, the excitation
condition is more favourable for the production of the K line. It appears that
the dispersion of the results is larger with EDS than with WDS but it was not
possible to find a correlation between the large dispersion and one of the
considered experimental parameters and quantification factors. Thus, one can
think that electron microprobes are inherently better for the determination of
mass fractions or that the implementation of quantitative analysis must be
optimized for some cases, especially in SEMs.
