Relative sensitivity and quantitation in glow-discharge mass-spectrometry - A progress report

It is hoped that the reader has acquired some appreciation of the problems, yet power of quantitative depth profiling using secondary ion mass spectrometry. The technique needs standards to obtain the accuracy needed for most of the applications at which it has excelled, and no doubt, this is a serious problem. Yet, in the field of analytical chemistry there exist very few techniques which exhibit quantitative accuracies in the 10-20% range without the use of standards, (techniques such as atomic absorbtion certainly require standards). These problems with quantitation are more than made up for by the technique's sub-ppm sensitivity, and universal applicability in terms of both sample type and elemental coverage, especially when one considers that this degree of sensitivity and accuracy is obtainable with depth resolution in the 50100 A range.