Quantification

Quantification with LIBS relies on relating the intensity of measured atomic peaks with concentrations of sample constituents.  Furthermore, certain types of materials, such as isotopes of hydrogen and heavy atoms and molecules, can be distinguished and differentiated using the LIBS technique. This can be useful in a number of applications including protein marking and quantification with dueterized water and nuclear forensics, as well as the general utility of sample quantification in analytical LIBS.

Currently our work focusses on establishing a set of procedures that a LIBS data set can be exposed to in order to determine the maximal amount of information about a sample with the fastest turnaround time. This type of work involved many aspects including:

• quantifying uncertainties introduced by all computations,
• advancing predictive capabilities of chemometirc and multivariate data driven models, physical spectral and plasma models, and
• Automating the pretreatment of measured spectra.

We are particularly interested in developing routines and procedures that return appropriate uncertainty assessments at every step of the analysis. This also involves establishing physically relevant benchmark problems and data sets to consider either using simulation tools or establishing a bank of appropriate experimental spectra.