Hydrogen Addition to the Nebulizer Gas for the Removal of Polyatomic Ion Interferences in Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry

✍ Scribed by L. Ebdon; M.J. Ford; P. Goodall; S.J. Hill

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1993
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 585 KB
• Volume: 48
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0026-265X
• DOI: 10.1006/mchj.1993.1101

✦ Synopsis

Investigations into the use of hydrogen addition in the nebulizer gas of an argon inductively coupled plasma (ICP) in an ICP-mass spectrometer for the possible reduction of polyatomic interferences are reported. Hydrogen was found to worsen interferences such as (\mathrm{ArO}^{+})and (\mathrm{ArCl}^{+})with respect to an all-argon system. In contrast to these argon-based interferences the levels of (\mathrm{MO}^{+})were found to be reduced by approximately a factor of 10 with the addition of hydrogen. The hydrogen-argon system was optimized using a simplex procedure. At the defined, optimum the level of (\mathrm{CeO}^{+})compared to that of (\mathrm{Ce}^{+})was approximately (0.5 %). Detection limits for (\mathrm{Gd}) in (10 \mu \mathrm{g} \mathrm{cm}^{-3}) La were (15.9 \mathrm{ng} \mathrm{cm}^{-3}) in the hydrogen-argon system compared to (2000 \mathrm{ng} \mathrm{cm}^{-3}) in the all-argon system. These conditions were also used for the analysis of the CRM Bastnasite mill feed ore, IGS 40, using slurry nebulization. The determination of (\mathrm{Sm}) was made possible and the determination of Gd slightly improved by the hydrogen addition. It was concluded that hydrogen addition in an appropriately optimized system offers improvements in heavy rare earth element (REE) determination, in the presence of their lighter counterparts, provided the concentration of the light REE does not exceed (\mu \mathrm{g} \mathrm{cm}^{-3}) levels. O 1993 Academic Press, Inc.