ASSESSMENT OF LASER-ABLATION AND SECTOR FIELD INDUCTIVELY-COUPLED PLASMA-MASS SPECTROMETRY FOR ELEMENTAL ANALYSIS OF SOLID SAMPLES

Coupling laser ablation and inductively coupled plasma mass spectromet ry (ICP-MS) creates a technique which is capable of producing isotopic and elemental analyses of solid materials quickly and with a minimum of sample preparation. The instrument most often coupled with a laser ablation system features a quadrupole mass analyzer to resolve the com ponent elements and isotopes, Other instrument designs employing elect ro-magnetic sector analyzers which have higher ion transmission effici ency and greater resolution capabilities to those found in traditional quadrupole instruments are also available, In this work we couple a l aser ablation system to a sector field ICP-MS and illustrate that anal ysis of solid materials is possible. We will demonstrate that detectio n limits of low ppt levels are possible for a 'bulk' analysis whilst m aintaining data precision of < 10% for a large number of elements acro ss the mass range. And finally, this work will show that single shot ' feature' analysis is possible with detection limits of below 10 ppb fo r a subset of elements, at precisions of < 1%.