INDUCED BREAKDOWN SPECTROSCOPY; INDUCTIVELY-COUPLED PLASMA; MOLECULAR ISOTOPIC SPECTROMETRY; FLIGHT MASS-SPECTROMETRY; LA-ICP-MS; DEPTH PROFILE; LIBS; SAMPLES; STEEL

Laser ablation has become a dominant technology for direct solid sampling in analytical chemistry. Laser ablation refers to the process in which an intense burst of energy delivered by a short laser pulse is used to sample (remove a portion of) a material. The advantages of laser-ablation chemical analysis include direct characterization of solids, no chemical procedures for dissolution, reduced risk of contamination or sample loss, analysis of very small samples not separable for solution analysis, and determination of spatial distributions of elemental composition. This short review describes the most common approaches-laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) and laser-ablation inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS)-and provides an introduction to laser-ablation molecular isotopic spectrometry (LAMIS).