Determination of doping elements of synthetic crystals by direct current glow discharge mass spectrometry

•A dc-GD-MS was applied for analysis of doping elements in synthetic crystals.•The two methods could sustain stable discharge and enhance the stability.•Ta carrier method was more effective to analyze rare earth elements.•The two methods could be used together to make up for the deficiency.

Direct current glow discharge mass spectrometry (dc-GD-MS) was applied for the determination of doping elements in synthetic crystals. To get stable discharge, the surface coating method and tantalum carrier method were used to support the sputtering and ionization of samples respectively. For the analysis of BaF2, Y3Al5O12 (YAG), Bi4Si3O12 (BSO), La3Ga5SiO14 (LGS), CsI and Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3-PbTiO3 (PMN-PT), the stable discharge current and the matrix signals were investigated by using these two methods. While for the analysis of CaF2 and γ-Al2O3, the tantalum carrier method could sustain much stable discharge to achieve fine intensity of matrix elements compared to the surface coating method. Furthermore, two Y3Al5O12 (YAG) samples were also studied by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometer (ICP-AES) to validate the precision, accuracy and reproducibility of these two methods. The results suggested that the dc-GD-MS would be a good choice to determine the doping elements in synthetic crystals by these two methods.

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