Gold traces to trace gold

Trace element fingerprinting of ancient Chinese gold with femtosecond laser ablation-inductively coupled mass spectrometry

“…LA-ICP-MS analysis of the fragments was expected to reveal either one Pd/Pt profile related to the gold source, as suggested in the literature (Watling et al, 1994;Guerra, 2004a), or none, due to random variation as a result of manufacture. Therefore, the emergence of three distinct Pd/Pt groupings is somewhat surprising.…”

A moderate microsampling in Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry analysis of cultural heritage objects: a review

“…The results of sensitive LA-ICP-MS elemental/isotopic measurements can be used to support the use of other instrumental meth- ods such as Scanning Electron Microscopy with Energy Dispersive X-Ray Spectrometry (SEM-EDS) [12,31,38,74,79,112,118,130,135,166,170,181,182], Electron Probe Microanalysis (EPMA) [75, 80, 81, 97, 112, 167, 183 -185], X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) [16,31,35,44,93,94,98,119,120], Proton Induced X-Ray Emission [22,41,95,114,186,187] or Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) [23, 36, 99, 100, 107, 108, 114, 146, 188 -192]. Leroy et al [193] reported the first application of confocal Synchrotron Radiation micro X-Ray Fluorescence (SR-m-XRF) with LA-ICP-MS.…”

Role of laser ablation–inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry in cultural heritage research: A review

“…Limits of detection up to two orders of magnitude lower compared with, e.g. to Proton Activation Analysis (PAA) [92][93][94][95][96] allowed to determine trace elements, whose analysis is decisive for provenance purposes, as an example in ancient gold coins. As a result, Pd, Pt and Rh enabled to discriminate Russian from Ottoman gold coins [92] while Sn, Sb and Pt allowed the separation of South American gold coins in three main groups: the Mexican coins, enriched in Sb, the Peruvian and Chilean ones with high Sn, and the Colombian coins that seemed to undergo an evolution in the raw material, from gold with high content of Pt to another with low content of this metal [93].…”

“…Even such authors (see, e.g. Vlachou-Mogire et al in [100] and Guerra and Calligaro [96,101]) define LA-ICP-MS as a semi-quantitative method of analysis that provides compositional fingerprint of unknown metal materials.…”