Professors Robert Houk and Mark Gordon of Iowa State University are supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to combine experiments and theory to try to eliminate interferences in Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS). The idea is to study the origin of polyatomic ion signals in order to eliminate them from the desired pure atomic ones. The approach is to use calculations to tune conditions to minimize abundance of the undesirable ions. Parameters include solvent load, the distance between the sampler and skimmer and temperature of the sampler and skimmer.
The goal of this instrument development project is to improve the precision and accuracy of ICP-MS method, which is used widely in a broad range of applications from materials science to geochemistry to biology for extremely sensitive atomic analysis.
