Trace Metals

Robertson Microlit Laboratories has the ability to detect and accurately quantitate trace metal species in pharmaceutical or chemical compounds at percent, ppm, ppb, and in some cases, ppt levels, through the use of plasma-based instrumental techniques.

Inductively coupled plasma, or ICP, is a high-temperature excitation source that desolvates, vaporizes, and atomizes samples in aerosol form, and then ionizes the resulting atoms. The excited analyte ions and atoms can then subsequently be detected by observing their emission lines (inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry, or ICP-OES), or the excited or ground state ions can be determined using a mass detector (inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, or ICP-MS).

Both ICP-OES and ICP-MS may be used for either single-element or sequential/simultaneous multi-element qualitative or quantitative analysis.

In addition, Robertson Microlit offers the ICP-MS multi-elemental scan, a service which provides a semi-quantitative determination of up to 81 elements in a single sample preparation.