9526956 Neal This grant awards $80,000 as two years partial support of the costs of an equipment upgrade and a graduate student to develop laser ablation, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) as a routine analytical tool for direct determination of trace element abundance in geological samples at the micro-scale. The work entails an upgrade to their current IR laser ablation torch to include shorter wavelengths including green and ultra-violet light, and will examine the influence of laser wavelength on the need for matrix matching of samples with external standards. ***
