Investigation on Matrix Effects in Silicate Minerals by Laser Ablation-Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry

Matrix effect between reference materials and samples plays an important role in the accuracy of analytical results by LA-ICP-MS. And elemental relative sensitivity factor(RSF) is an important characterization of matrix effect. We investigated the differences of RSFs of 49 common elements in 17 silicate glass reference materials and 10 major and minor elements in 10 natural silicate mineral reference materials of EMPA, compared different internal standard elements (Ca, Al, Si) to compensate for matrix effect and discussed the influences of element fractionation effect on the RSFs. The results showed that the differences of matrix effect in glass reference materials or silicate minerals were both inapparent. And RSDs of RSFs between glass reference materials and minerals were all less than 8%. In particular, the differences of matrix effect between glass reference materials with natural geological matrix and basalt matrix and silicate minerals were smaller. Ca was an ideal internal standard for analyzing silicate mineral samples. Because of slight fractionation behavior, Si was not an ideal internal standard than Ca and Al. The same elements in silicate glass reference materials and minerals had similar but not serious fractionation behaviors. 27 elements in forsterite were analyzed by external calibration in conjunction with internal standardization. The results showed that the relative errors of major elements were nearly all superior to 4% and minor and trace elements also obtained satisfactory results.