Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) is one of the most sensitive multi-elemental analysis techniques available that can detect elements at milligram to nanogram levels per liter. As such, it is recognized as one of the most important analytical techniques in a variety of industries including, but not limited to, impurity monitoring in semiconductor industries, environmental monitoring, geochemical analysis, mining and metallurgy, pharmaceutical analysis, among others. ICP-MS offers extremely high sensitivity (i.e. low detection limits) for most of the elements in the periodic table.
Solid samples are generally dissolved or digested before analyses. The inductively coupled plasma is a very strong ionization source that fully decomposes the sample into its constituent elements and transforms those elements into ions. These ions then are subsequently extracted and accelerated into a mass analyzer for detection. Ion intensity acquisitions are then converted to concentration units by comparison with calibration standards. This technique is especially powerful for accurate chemical analyses.
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