Inductively Coupled Plasma(ICP) Mass Spectrometry(MS) Hyphenated with Atomic Emission Spectrometry(AES) for Simultaneous Determination of Major, Minor and Micro Amounts of Elements in Geochemical Samples

Introduction Geological resource survey demands for determining various constituents including major, minor, micro, trace and ultra-trace levels of elements for preparing the map of resource distribution of our country. As a powerful and popularly used technique for multi-element analysis, inductively coupled plasma(ICP) atomic emission spectrometry (AES) has been applied to this field for a period of time1-3]. However, ICP spectrometric determination of those micro, trace and ultratrace elements needs enrichment procedures for improving the detection limit, which is unacceptable in case a great mass of samples should be analyzed as that in the task of geological resource survey. On the other hand, although ICP mass spectrometry(MS) is considered the most powerful method for trace elements determination4,5], it is difficult for ICP-MS to be used to determine the trace and major analytes simultaneously in a spectrum.