Laser assisted plasma spectrochemistry: laser ablation

This paper presents a brief overview of the current research issues in laser ablation for chemical analysis, discusses several fundamental studies of laser ablation using time-resolved shadowgraph and spectroscopic imaging, and describes recent data using femtosecond ablation sampling for ICP-MS and LIBS. This manuscript represents a summary of the plenary lecture presented at the 2004 Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry.