From big to strong: growth of the Asian laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy community

摘要

Laser-in duced breakdown spectroscopy(LIBS),firstly proposed in 1962 as Brech and Cross[I]successfully detected the plasma emission induced by a ruby laser,has attracted more and more attention in both academia and industry due to its unique analytical features such as little or no sample preparation,simultaneous multi-elemental analysis,and remote sensing etc[2-4].Restrained from the highcost and poor reliability of instruments back then,the research popularity of LIBS declined quickly after a few years of initial mania of LIBS study.Since the 1990s,benefiting from the significant development of the hardware setups including laser,spectrometer,and ICCD,the'LIBS fever,re-emerged with continuous progress achieved in various applications as well as fundamental studies for the past two decades.In 2004,James D Winefordner,a prestigious an alytical scientist,crowned LIBS as a'future superstar5 for chemical analysis[5],marking the great potential of LIBS.However,on the way of fully commercialization and industrialization,LIBS is facing three big challenges:(1)to improve the quantitative analysis performance,particularly the repeatability and reproducibility performance;(2)to reduce the instrumental cost;(3)to improve the long-term stability and robustness for industrial applications.To finally transform LIBS from'future superstar,to'superstar5,joint effort of worldwide LIBS community is needed[6].