Non-Destructive Characterisation of Pigments by Means of the Complementary use of Pixe-Alpha and XRD portable Systems

The portable PIXE-alpha system realised by INFN-CNR has been employed for the analysis of pigments present in some Roman frescoes. The PIXE data have been used to select between the possible mineralogical phases of interest present in the XRD spectrum of a portable diffractometer. It is shown, in a typical case, that, by taking into account both the XRD and PIXE data, a quantitative determination of concentration of the various components is possible.