Plasma-wall interactions are considered of major concern for future tritium-loaded tokamaks such as ITER. In-vessel fuel retention, limited for safety issues, needs to be well evaluated through precise inventories. This phenomenon is governed by a complex mechanism involving physical and chemical erosion and deposition, thermal diffusion, trapping, recombination and desorption. Triggering event is the low energy implantation/deposition process occurring on the plasma vessel surface. Most published studies addressing this question are carried out using post-mortem sample analysis, either after sample immersion in deuterium plasma or removal of a wall subassembly, or following deuterium implantation using low energy implanters. Both techniques require a non negligible delay between implantation and characterization steps, inducing potential elemental migration and redistribution. Here we report the design of a setup intended for simultaneous low-energy ion implantation and high-energy microbeam analysis.

Based on a versatile compact ECR ion source coupled to the analysis chamber of the nuclear microprobe of Saclay, the setup allows hydrogen and deuterium implantation between 0.1 to 2 keV on millimeter-scale surfaces, while depth-resolved ion beam analysis (mainly nuclear reaction analysis) is performed at the micrometric scale. This unique arrangement allows: (i) dynamic 3D imaging of light element distribution during implantation process, previous results for deuterium distribution in carbon fiber composites showing a high textural dependency; (ii) evaluation of analyzing ion beam induced damage on the sample and potential redistribution of implanted elements. Experimental results will give access to useful data for fuel behavior modeling inside studied materials.