Lay description Asphalt pavements are made by mixing aggregates with asphalt binder, a black, glue-like substance obtained from crude oil refining. The combination of asphalt and aggregate is called an asphalt mixture. When asphalt pavements need to be removed and replaced, the asphalt mixture can be recycled and combined with new aggregate and asphalt for use in new asphalt pavements. However, engineers understand very little about how the recycled asphalt blends with the new asphalt. Both the new and old asphalt binders are black, and their chemical compositions are so similar. This makes it challenging to differentiate among new and old asphalt binders within an asphalt mixture without the addition of a tracer to one of the asphalts. Previous research has shown that adding a titanium dioxide tracer to the new asphalt binder enables distinguishing the new and recycled asphalt in an asphalt mixture, using X-ray analysis in a scanning electron microscope. However, previous studies have failed to evaluate the sample preparation on the distribution of the tracer within an asphalt mixture. This study overcomes these shortcomings and yields a reliable method for adding the tracer to the new binder and preparing asphalt mixtures samples for X-ray analysis.