Versatile software for semiautomatic analysis and processing of laser-induced plasma spectra

The present article describes the main characteristics and operations of SALIPS (software for the analysis of laser-induced plasma spectra), a computer program designed for use in Spectroscopy. During the last years laser-induced plasma spectroscopy (LIPS) has grown in popularity and different applications have been developed in several fields. However, until now there is no software reported to perform the recognition of the elemental composition of a generic sample from its LIP spectrum, which must be achieved by hand in a tedious comparative process of experimental peaks with emission lines from databases. For this reason, a computer program that includes several tools to provide a semi-automatic identification of the peaks of a LIP spectrum has been developed. The program, written in Microsoft® Visual Basic® code, has a user-friendly graphical interface and is a flexible tool that enables to handle, edit, copy and print a quick presentation of the data including automatically the identification results in the graph. SALIPS also provides some physical properties of the elements and includes algorithms for performing the simulation of spectra. The potential of the program is illustrated with some examples.