Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry: recent trends and developments

This year inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) moves into the fourth decade of development. In this article, some recent trends and developments in ICP-MS are reviewed, with special focus on instrumental development and emerging applications. Some key trends include a novel mass spectrometer for elemental and speciation analysis in Mattauch-Herzog geometry with a focal-plane-camera array detector. The reason for this development is the possibility to record the full elemental mass range simultaneously and all the time. Monitoring fast transient signals in chromatography or laser ablation is now possible and will become an important asset in future studies, e.g., for isotope ratio analysis. In addition, there is a lot of new activity and interest in the area of nanosciences and medicine. Here, instrumental developments are reported that allow the direct analysis of microparticles and single cells.