ICP Emission Spectrometers: 1995 Analytical Figures of Merit

Abstract

The first commercially available inductively coupled plasma (ICP) emission spectrometers were introduced in 1974, more than twenty years ago. Since its introduction, ICP atomic emission spectrometry (AES) has increasingly attracted the interest of analytical chemists and is widely used for routine elemental analysis. As could be expected, ICP emission spectrometry is currently a mature technique in terms of analytical figures of merit. However, because of a strong and active competition among the various instrument companies involved in this field and the growing sales of ICP-MS systems, some improvements in the analytical characteristics of ICP emission spectrometers have recently appeared. It therefore seems appropriate to summarize the current state of the art of the analytical characteristics of ICP emission spectrometers.