The role of oxygen in analytical glow discharges: GD-OES and GD-ToF-MS studies

What is it about?

In this paper, we studied the effects of small, but application relevant, amounts of oxygen on argon analytical glow discharge mass spectrometry and compared the results to optical emission spectrometry using iron, titanium, copper and gold samples. The results presented here underline the important differences between optical emission detection and mass spectrometry.

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Why is it important?

GD-MS instruments are much more sensitive to molecular gases than GD-OES instruments due to the quenching of Arm atoms and ion recombination. The comparison to another fast flow GD-MS source shows that differences in the source design can yield very different source characteristics in terms of sensitivity to molecular gases. The estimation of sputtered oxygen from sample show that it is very unlikely to get oxygen concentration more than 0.05% under standard conditions used for GD-OES,