Determination of low-level 135Cs and 135Cs/137Cs atomic ratios in large volume of seawater by chemical separation coupled with triple-quadrupole inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry measurement for its oceanographic applications

Trends and Advances in Inductively Coupled Plasma Tandem Quadruple Mass Spectrometry (ICP-QMS/QMS) With Reaction Cell

“…5, N2O, CO2, and CH4 were also used in multiple reports instead of the default cell gases. By using N2O as the cell gas, the production rate of the oxide ions of (Mn, Fe, Ni, Cu, Zn, and Se), 1 Sr, 3,68 Br, 8 Ba, 23 (Ge, Eu, Yb) 29 and Ra, 28,45 is greatly improved in comparison to those obtained by using O2 as the cell gas. This feature provides a higher sensitivity and/or a better separation of spectral interference.…”

“…Research fields and objectives. The research fields of the above references covered biology, 1-15 energy, 16 environment, 9,[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32] food/medical, 10-12,25-27,33-40 geology, 28,41-47 material, [48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60] and radionulide, 4,[22][23][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71] respectively. In addition to these conventional elemental analysis topics, a study on the gas phase catalytic reaction has also been reported by using the reaction cell of ICP-QMS/QMS as the in-situ reaction field.…”

“…Many references used He, H2, O2, or NH3, which are usually included as the default cell gas for ICP-QMS/QMS. 4,22,26,44,46,[62][63][64][65][66] There are also multiple references using N2O, 3,23,28,45,68 CO2, 24,27,65 or CH4 43 as the cell gas to improve the separation of spectral interferences. For single element solution, the typical relative uncertainty of isotopic ratio obtained by ICP-QMS/QMS is roughly in the range from 0.1% to 0.2%, which is inferior to that can be achieved by multiple collector (MC-) ICP-MS by 3 to 4 orders of magnitude.…”

“…3,28,45 On the other hand, highly precise analysis of the Cs isotopes ( 135 Cs + and 137 Cs + ) was achieved by complete conversion of the interfering ions, i.e., 135 Ba + and 137 Ba + , to oxide ions using N2O as the cell gas and resulted in the complete elimination of the spectral inteferences. 23,68 Regardless of the fact that CO2 as the cell gas did not improve the sensitivity for isotope analysis of U at the mass-shift mode by ICP-QMS/QMS, effective separation of the spectral interferences was achieved for the measurement of Pu + at the on-mass mode by improving the conversion of UH + to UO + . 24 Single particle analysis.…”

Developing Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Capabilities for Anthropogenic Radionuclide Analysis to Extend the Set of Oceanographic Tracers

“…Two recent studies show first results on 135 Cs concentration in general seawater from the west coast of Greenland. There, 40-50 L of ocean water were used for the successful detection with ICP-MS/MS (Zhu et al, 2021) and 200 mL with TIMS (Zhu et al, 2020b) characterized by a detection limit of 135 Cs/ 133 Cs ∼4 × 10 −10 . The residence time of Cs is comparable to that of U and amounts to 330 kyr for Cs (Broecker and Peng, 1982), so 135 Cs can also be considered a conservative tracer which might have entered the marine environment due to the Fukushima accident (Zheng et al, 2014), representing a point source for radionuclide tracing.…”