It’s been quite a few years since femtosecond (fs) lasers appeared on the scene, and the adoption of this technology by micromachining and medical applications in the early 2000s led to a rapid acceleration of the technology providing a range of different systems, wavelengths and overall performance variants that we see today.
Femtosecond lasers have been of interest to the laser ablation ICP-MS community since those early days as the use of ultrashort femtosecond laser pulses was seen as an important advantage for mitigating laser induced fractionation.
While there were performance barriers to fs LA-ICP-MS in the recent past, the latest generation of Pharos fs lasers from Light Conversion are reliable, robust, and genuinely turnkey. With this laser source incorporated into the Teledyne Photon Machines’ Excite system, we can now incorporate a purposely designed optic beam path that allows for uncompromised laser transmission providing crater geometries that are far more useable than anything previously seen.
Photos: Ablation and crater profile of pyrrhotite courtesy of Michael Pribil (USGS, Denver High Resolution Lab).Click to download Technical Note
