The micro-X-ray fluorescence (MXRF) and micro-X-ray diffraction (MXRD) spectrometers play crucial roles in the understanding the provenance, material and fired technologies, etc of Chinese ancient ceramics. Polycapillary optics has the advantages of focusing the incoming X-ray beam into smaller than 100μm diameter and the gains of intensities of X-ray more than 1000 times. In our Lab, We developed the MXRF and MXRD spectrometers by ourselves and reported their applications in the Chinese archaeological objects. In this reports, we reports the results of MXRF and MXRD in the study of Chinese ancient Pb glaze ceramics. We collected many archaeological samples from Tang sancai pottery (618-907) to red and green glaze porcelain fired in Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). In further, we explored the provenances and fired technologies of Pb glaze ceramics by MXRF and MXRD, including Tang sanci pottery.

Lin CHENG, professor of School of Physics and Astronomy, Beijing Normal University. The mainly research works in our team are developing the high performances of polycaillary optics and its associated with X-ray spectrometer. We have already built MXRF and MXRD with polycapillary optics and its widely using for the archaeometry, materials science, environmental science and so on.