Demo and teardown of an X-ray fluorescence gun (measures chemical composition)

It's easy enough to generate x-rays, for better or worse, but the devil's in the details. The x-rays apparently need to be monochromatic, or nearly so, so you can't just apply HV to any old random radio tube that's lying around. And then you need a beryllium exit window on the tube and another one at the detector entrance. Fascinating teardown on one of these things at Ben Krasnow's channel ▶ this video .

I would like to add a video on XRF from Applied Science, as the device is not very well known (at least in .cz, I have learned about it only recently). ▶ this video

There are no hand held devices which will tell you if the soil you're vaguely near has heavy metals in it, nor how much. Well, technically, there are, but now you're back in the ionizing-radiation business: ▶ this video

Applied Science did a video playing with one. ▶ this video There are some significant limits on what it can analyze, but it's terrific for learning about metal alloys.

For what its worth they did make the tape based xray florescence machines, I saw them on applied science ▶ this video

I believe manganese does naturally, but only with a UV laser: ▶ this video Artificially, one that works with probably most/all lasers would be an active phosphor display(I forget the specific cocktail it's composed of), like the kind from an oscilloscope