Speaker
Description
The study of ancient metallurgy, particularly the analysis of bronze and copper alloys, plays a crucial role in understanding the technological and artistic advancements of past civilisations. While traditional analysis involves invasive methods, such as SEM observation of cross sections and metallography, neutron-based techniques offer a highly promising solution for the non-invasive characterisation of the elemental, isotopic, and phase composition of the objects under study [1][2][3].
Here, the INFN CHNet_BRONZE project and the main results obtained so far are presented. The aim of the project is to develop and quantitatively calibrate techniques that exploit neutron probes for the analysis of Cu-based archaeological artefacts. The project assesses three bulk analysis methods: Time-of-Flight Neutron Diffraction (ToF-ND) that returns the phase composition of an artefact and the microstructure of metal phases; Neutron Resonance Transmission Imaging (NRTI) that allows bidimensional maps of the elemental and isotopic distribution; Bragg-Edge Neutron Transmission analysis (BENT) that explores the spatial distribution of metal phases, microstructure and texture of the artefact.
A set of purposely prepared copper-based reference samples, in powder and cast form with known composition and structure, are first used to define experimental and analytical methodologies. The results obtained with the three techniques allowed to derive calibration curves that can be later used for the interpretation of data obtained from historical bronze artefacts. This can help to answer questions of historical and cultural interest on archaeological bronzes, allowing to extract compositional and microstructure information from the bulk of the objects non-invasively.
REFERENCES
[1]. A. Fedrigo et al., Archaeol Anthropol Sci 10, 1249-1263 (2018)
[2]. A. De Palmas et al., Archaeol Anthropol Sci 13, 101 (2021)
[3]. G. Marcucci et al., European Physical Journal Plus, 139 (2024) 475.