LIBS

Dr. Richard R. Hark, a professor in the Department of Chemistry at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, discusses his work using LIBS for emergency response to hazardous materials. Adam L. Miller, the director at the Huntingdon County Emergency Management Agency in Pennsylvania, also talks about his work as a first responder and how he has been involved in Hark's research.

Users must be careful when developing material classification and calibration methods for LIBS. By following some guidelines, one can achieve relative standard deviation values of 2–3% for many types of analysis, and below 1% for homogenous samples.

NASA's Curiosity rover landed inside the 3.7-billion-year-old Gale Crater on Mars on August 6, 2012, and it has been obtaining data about the planet?s rocks and soils with its ChemCam instrument ever since. We recently spoke with Roger Wiens of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Principal Investigator of the ChemCam instrument, about the instrument's laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) capabilities.

Dr. Richard R. Hark, a professor in the Department of Chemistry at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, discusses his work with LIBS in applications such as forensic science, conflict minerals, and geochemical fingerprinting.

The choices for LIBS hardware are discussed in detail, particularly lasers and spectrometers, and the trade-offs between cost, size, and performance are illustrated.

Dustin McIntyre, of the National Energy Technology Laboratory, US Department of Energy in Morgantown, West Virginia, has been exploring the use of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) to measure subsurface gases, liquids, and solids at subsurface conditions.

An overview for those considering implementation of LIBS to solve a particular analytical problem, and an introduction for those interested in learning more about LIBS. Part I concentrates on the basics of the measurement and typical implementation.

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is already being used to characterize nuclear material at nuclear energy sites in the United Kingdom. So could LIBS help Japan with its current nuclear crisis? To find out, we spoke to Andy Whitehouse of Applied Photonics.

A Q&A with Jose Almirall, PhD, professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the director of the International Forensic Research Institute at Florida International University.

NASA plans to utilize laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) instrumentation on the next Mars Rover, PEWPEW.

The United States Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has been applying standoff laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) to hazardous material detection and determination. We describe several standoff systems that have been developed by ARL and provide a brief overview of standoff LIBS progress at ARL. We also present some current standoff LIBS results from explosive residues on organic substrates and biomaterials from different growth media. These new preliminary results demonstrate that standoff LIBS has the potential to discriminate hazardous materials in more complex backgrounds.

After nearly three decades and three spacecaft landings on the surface of Mars, we still do not know what the rocks are made of . . .