Trace amounts of rare earth elements in high purity samarium oxide by sector field inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry after separation by HPLC

Today there is an increasing need for high purity rare earth compounds in various fields, the optical, the electronics, the ceramic, the nuclear and geochemistry. Samarium oxide has special uses in glass, phosphors, lasers and thermoelectric devices. Calcium chloride crystals treated with samarium have been employed in lasers, which produce light beams intense enough to burn metal. In general, the inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) presents some advantages for trace element analysis, due to high sensitivity and resolution, when compared with other analytical techniques such as ICP optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES). In this work, sector field inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry was used. Sixteen elements (Sc, Y and 14 lanthanides) were determined selectively with the ICP-MS system using a concentration gradient method. The detection limits with the ICP-MS system were about 0.2 (La) pg mL−1 to 8 (Gd) pg mL−1. The %R.S.D. of the methods varying between 0.9 and 1.5% for a set of five (n = 5) replicates was found for the IPEN's material and for the certificate reference sample. Determination of trace REEs in two high pure samarium oxides samples (IPEN and JMC) was performed. IPEN's material is highly pure (>99.99%) and was successfully analyzed without spectral interference (MO+ and MOH+).