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Millions of measurements are performed each year by liquid based analytical atomic spectrometry to support healthcare, diagnostic tests, environmental monitoring, material assay, product development and safety. Despite the effort to develop absolute methods, most methods still depend on calibration solutions, which are gravimetric mixtures of high purity solvents and high purity (source material) metals or compounds. As in the real world ideal purity does not exist, the impurity of the solvent and the purity of the source material needs to be known. The impurity of a solvent with respect to one analyte can be measured rather easily and with low limits of determination. In contrast the measurement of the purity of the source material, i.e., the mass fraction of the main constituent in a high purity metal, is more difficult to determine. It becomes even more difficult when the source material is not a pure metal but a compound since problems regarding stoichiometry arise additionally. Although the major producers of calibration solutions make a special effort to determine the purity of the source material, the actual purity statement is often incomplete or not demonstrated. The main reason for this situation is the complexity and high effort necessary to fully characterize such a material. This problem holds to a very wide extent also for the primary standards for element determination at the National Metrology Institutes and Designated Institutes (NMIs and DIs). It is the task of the NMIs and DIs to realise and disseminate primary standards for providing traceability to the International System of Units (SI). The primary elemental standards at the NMIs should provide the link to secondary standards produced by commercial producers and other independently prepared standards for element determination. Without such primary standards, elemental calibration solutions may vary and, depending on the uncertainty required, comparability of measurement in time and space results cannot be achieved.
ICP-MS has played a key role in inorganic chemical metrology for 25 years, from the 1993 CIPM feasibility study which led to establishment of the CCQM. Since that time, the Inorganic Analysis Working Group of the CCQM has organised 56 international comparisons involving measurements by ICP-MS and, in a recent comparison, 16 different national institutes submitted their results using the technique. Metrological applications of ICP-MS currently address an enormous range of measurements using a wide variety of instrumentation, calibration strategies and methodologies. This review provides an overview of the ICP-MS field with an emphasis on developments which are of particular relevance to chemical metrology.
Examples from CCQM comparisons and the services available from the participants are used to illustrate how the capability and scope of ICP-MS methods have expanded far beyond the expectations of 1993. This is due in part to the research and development Programmes of the national institutes which participate in the CCQM. They have played a key role in advancing new instrumentation and applications for elemental analysis, isotope dilution mass spectrometry, determination of isotopic ratio or composition, and speciation of organometallic compounds. These developments are continuing today, as demonstrated by work in new fields such as heteroatom quantitation of proteins, characterisation and counting of nanoparticles using spICP-MS, and LA-ICP-MS analysis of solid materials.