ATOMIC SPECTROMETRY UPDATE - ATOMIC MASS-SPECTROMETRY

The format of this year's Update follows that used last year(1) with s ome minor changes in the section headings, Although an attempt is made to consider all relevant refereed papers, conference abstracts, repor ts, book chapters and patents for inclusion, this review does not atte mpt to be comprehensive in its coverage, Critical selection is based a n criteria which have been applied more strictly this year than in pre vious years in order to focus more sharply on the mast significant dev elopments reported during the period (approximately corresponding to 1 997) covered by this Update, The prime consideration is that the repor ts should present advances in instrumentation and methodology or impro ved understanding of the fundamental professes involved in the MS proc ess. As a general rule, conference abstracts are not included because they rarely provide sufficient information to judge whether or not the y meet the criteria, We consider it better to wait for full details to appear in a refereed journal. A similar policy applies to those paper s in a language other than English and unlikely to reach a wide reader ship, Routine applications of atomic MS are not covered in this Update and readers are referred to the Updates on Industrial Analysis: Metal s, Chemicals and Advanced Materials,(2) Environmental Analysis(3) and Clinical and Biological: Materials, Food and Beverages.(4) An addition al review that can be recommended is that of Moens(5) on applications of MS in the analysis of biological materials. Comprehensive evaluatio ns of MS techniques for the analysis of solid samples have been report ed by Gijbels and Bogaerts(6) and Becker et al.(7) Papers included in this Update must be on atomic spectrometry but some areas of study int roduce problems in defining atomic and molecular studies, One of the m ajor drives in recent years has been to develop methods for speciation studies, in particular using ESMS, GC-MS or ICP-MS, The study, for ex ample, of organic arsenic species by ICP-MS involves MS of the atomic ions but in ESMS and GC-MS the molecular species are usually detected. In general, studies of 'exotic' nuclei far from stability are exclude d but the determination of radioactive elements in 'real' samples can be included. Very few measurements in SIRMS are of atomic species, yet the object of measuring natural isotopic composition is to study or u se a fundamental atomic property, Such studies are included but the us e of enriched spikes in tracer studies are excluded because the focus of the study is not on the atomic properties of the tracer element. Th e strong progress being made in most areas of atomic MS is evident fro m the different sections of this Update. The various trends have been identified in each section and range from the continued improvements i n sample preparation for TIMS analysis of remarkable sensitivity and p recision to the demand for simpler and cheaper AMS instrumentation so that applications to biomedical research can be fully exploited. Much attention continues to be given to sample preparation and introduction for ICP-MS, in particular for speciation analysis, yet relatively lit tle effort is being given to instrumental development. Although SIMS a nd SNMS are widely used techniques, fundamental problems remain for qu antification and work continues on developing methodologies to optimiz e analyses.