ElementLIBS User's Guide: An operational aid for use and development

Godt, Christopher James [Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)] (ORCID:0009000182816868)

doi:10.2172/2520079

DOE OSTI · 2520079

ElementLIBS User's Guide: An operational aid for use and development

Godt, Christopher James [Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)] (ORCID:0009000182816868)

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Abstract

Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy or LIBS is a rapid, in-situ analytical technique where a laser of known energy is pulsed at the surface of an analyte. The laser pulse rapidly heats a localized area to many thousand degrees Kelvin, ablating part of the analyte and turning it into a plasma. As the plasma cools, excited atoms return to a ground state with known emission energies. This emitted energy is captured by various spectrometers and provides a spectrum of the emitted energies and intensities. This spectrum can be analyzed to provide the elemental composition of a sample by using known emission lines and relative abundance. ElementLIBS was developed for the SciAps hand-held LIBS model Z300 but will work with any model that provides a LIBS spectrum of similar resolution. The Z300 has an integrated resolution of 1/30 nm with a range of approximately 180nm – 960nm, providing an output spectrum of 23431 pixels across three spectrometers. These criteria are only provided as a reference, as the software was designed to work with any size spectrum, provided the input file is of the correct format and the models were developed using the same framework. If spectra of varying dimensions are used, the software will fail without warning and unusual events could occur.

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Godt, Christopher James [Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)] (ORCID:0009000182816868). 2025-02-11. ElementLIBS User's Guide: An operational aid for use and development. https://doi.org/10.2172/2520079

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