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Sensing Trace-Level Metal Elements in Water Using Chirped Femtosecond Laser Pulses in the Filamentation Regime

Femtosecond filament-induced breakdown spectroscopy (FIBS) is an efficient approach in remote and in situ detection of a variety of trace elements, but it was recently discovered that the FIBS of water is strongly dependent on the large-bandgap semiconductor property of water, making the FIBS signal...

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Autores principales: Chen, Shanming, Cong, Xun, Chen, Junyan, Zang, Hongwei, Li, Helong, Xu, Huailiang
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9694792/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36433371
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s22228775
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author Chen, Shanming
Cong, Xun
Chen, Junyan
Zang, Hongwei
Li, Helong
Xu, Huailiang
author_facet Chen, Shanming
Cong, Xun
Chen, Junyan
Zang, Hongwei
Li, Helong
Xu, Huailiang
author_sort Chen, Shanming
collection PubMed
description Femtosecond filament-induced breakdown spectroscopy (FIBS) is an efficient approach in remote and in situ detection of a variety of trace elements, but it was recently discovered that the FIBS of water is strongly dependent on the large-bandgap semiconductor property of water, making the FIBS signals sensitive to laser ionization mechanisms. Here, we show that the sensitivity of the FIBS technique in monitoring metal elements in water can be efficiently improved by using chirped femtosecond laser pulses, but an asymmetric enhancement of the FIBS intensity is observed for the negatively and positively chirped pulses. We attribute the asymmetric enhancement to their different ionization rates of water, in which the energy of the photons participating in the ionization process in the front part of the negatively chirped pulse is higher than that in the positively chirped pulse. By optimizing the pulse chirp, we show that the limit of detection of the FIBS technique for metal elements in water, e.g., aluminum, can reach to the sub-ppm level, which is about one order of magnitude better than that by the transform-limited pulse. We further examine the FIBS spectra of several representative water samples including commercial mineral water, tap water, and lake water taken from two different environmental zones, i.e., a national park and a downtown business district (Changchun, China), from which remarkably different concentrations of Ca, Na, and K elements of these samples are obtained. Our results provide a possibility of using FIBS for direct and fast metal elemental analysis of water in different field environments.
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spelling pubmed-96947922022-11-26 Sensing Trace-Level Metal Elements in Water Using Chirped Femtosecond Laser Pulses in the Filamentation Regime Chen, Shanming Cong, Xun Chen, Junyan Zang, Hongwei Li, Helong Xu, Huailiang Sensors (Basel) Article Femtosecond filament-induced breakdown spectroscopy (FIBS) is an efficient approach in remote and in situ detection of a variety of trace elements, but it was recently discovered that the FIBS of water is strongly dependent on the large-bandgap semiconductor property of water, making the FIBS signals sensitive to laser ionization mechanisms. Here, we show that the sensitivity of the FIBS technique in monitoring metal elements in water can be efficiently improved by using chirped femtosecond laser pulses, but an asymmetric enhancement of the FIBS intensity is observed for the negatively and positively chirped pulses. We attribute the asymmetric enhancement to their different ionization rates of water, in which the energy of the photons participating in the ionization process in the front part of the negatively chirped pulse is higher than that in the positively chirped pulse. By optimizing the pulse chirp, we show that the limit of detection of the FIBS technique for metal elements in water, e.g., aluminum, can reach to the sub-ppm level, which is about one order of magnitude better than that by the transform-limited pulse. We further examine the FIBS spectra of several representative water samples including commercial mineral water, tap water, and lake water taken from two different environmental zones, i.e., a national park and a downtown business district (Changchun, China), from which remarkably different concentrations of Ca, Na, and K elements of these samples are obtained. Our results provide a possibility of using FIBS for direct and fast metal elemental analysis of water in different field environments. MDPI 2022-11-13 /pmc/articles/PMC9694792/ /pubmed/36433371 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s22228775 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Chen, Shanming
Cong, Xun
Chen, Junyan
Zang, Hongwei
Li, Helong
Xu, Huailiang
Sensing Trace-Level Metal Elements in Water Using Chirped Femtosecond Laser Pulses in the Filamentation Regime
title Sensing Trace-Level Metal Elements in Water Using Chirped Femtosecond Laser Pulses in the Filamentation Regime
title_full Sensing Trace-Level Metal Elements in Water Using Chirped Femtosecond Laser Pulses in the Filamentation Regime
title_fullStr Sensing Trace-Level Metal Elements in Water Using Chirped Femtosecond Laser Pulses in the Filamentation Regime
title_full_unstemmed Sensing Trace-Level Metal Elements in Water Using Chirped Femtosecond Laser Pulses in the Filamentation Regime
title_short Sensing Trace-Level Metal Elements in Water Using Chirped Femtosecond Laser Pulses in the Filamentation Regime
title_sort sensing trace-level metal elements in water using chirped femtosecond laser pulses in the filamentation regime
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9694792/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36433371
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s22228775
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