Can ultrafast single-particle analysis using ICP-MS affect the detection limit? Case study: Silver nanoparticles

Atomic spectrometry update: review of advances in the analysis of metals, chemicals and materials

“…It was shown, which is again described in detail, that the HDC-sNP-ICP-MS setup was able to differentiate between similar sized lipids, the liposome inorganic content could be evaluated, that the particle uptake distribution of the loaded liposomes could be obtained in parallel with the actual hydrodynamic size of the nano-carrier systems and that liposome loaded and free NPs could be distinguished which is not possible with conventional sNP-ICP-MS. Due to instrumental developments it is now possible to use sub-millisecond dwell times for sNP-ICP-MS and the effect of this on the LOD size obtainable for sNP-ICP-MS was investigated by Mestek et al using Ag NPs as the target analyte. 286 Using dwell times of 10, 20 and 50 ms did not lead to a statistically signicant decrease in the obtainable LOD size , which ranged between 9.4 AE 1.2 and 11 AE 4.7 nm, when compared with the value obtained using a dwell time of 100 ms, 12.4 AE 2.4 nm. When analysing for Ag NPs close to the LOD size , a low detection yield was observed, with only 5% and 44%, for 14 and 20 nm NPs, respectively, of the expected number of NPs as estimated from the transport efficiency, being detected.…”

Atomic spectrometry update: review of advances in the analysis of metals, chemicals and materials

“…The effect of these shorter dwell times on the particle size detection limit (PS LOD) has been reported. 280 Decreasing dwell times below 100 ms did not lead to a statistically signicant decrease in the PS LOD. For Ag NPs PS LOD was estimated to be 10-11 nm.…”

Monodisperse microdroplets: a tool that advances single-particle ICP-MS measurements

“…Microsecond data acquisition can be used to improve S/N ratio to some extent because less noise is integrated in each measurement bin. 77 We will not discuss microsecond sp-ICP-MS here; instead, we study the necessity of nding and correcting split events for millisecond sp-ICP-MS.…”