Rapid geochemical imaging of rocks and minerals with handheld laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS)

Analyses of Li-Rich Minerals Using Handheld LIBS Tool

“…This is due to the large range of potentially detected elements, which makes it a promising technique for the future. For a better overview, one can read the numerous papers and reviews on the applications of LIBS for geological purposes [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. One may recall that the Perseverance rover on Mars, similar to the previous Curiosity rover, uses the LIBS technique (with the ChemCam and SuperCam instruments, respectively).…”

“…More recently, portable LIBS tools have been widely used for the analysis of rocks, minerals, economic elements, and light elements [18,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. Although quantitative data are mainly obtained from metal studies [30,35], for more complex materials such as geological mineral mixtures or rocks, standards and calibrations need to be designed to obtain consistent data when using the LIBS technique and, thus, the handheld LIBS tools [6,17,[36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43].…”

“…The relative standard deviations that were obtained from the different samples, and particularly for the lithium emission peaks, were between 7% for the powder pellets and 15% for the minerals. Previous studies have already reported the potential of handheld LIBS for lithium applications [18,32,57].…”

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy: a unique analytical tool for the geosciences

“…LIBS coupled with chemometric data processing methods has shown a great potential for a broad spectrum of practical geoscience applications including environmental monitoring and remediation, 8 paleoclimate reconstruction, 9 stratigraphic correlation, 10 geoarchaeology, 11 the determination of material properties, 12 mineral provenance determination 13 and mineral exploration, prospect evaluation and quality control in deposit exploitation. [14][15][16] The application of chemometric methods to LIBS data in a geological context is continuously increasing as spectral databases grow ever larger and are applied to an increasing variety of geomaterials for new purposes. 5 For example, a correlation of rock units was attempted on 16 limestone beds collected from three quarries in Kansas (USA) by processing their LIBS chemical fingerprint data using various chemometric methods such as principal component analysis, soft independent modelling by class analogy and partial least squares regression analyses to obtain a stratigraphic interpretation.…”

“…26 Furthermore, LIBS raster mapping allowed for the rapid discrimination of arsenian pyrite and arsenopyrite, the two main As-bearing phases at MacLellan, from other Fe-bearing minerals in the sample matrix. More recently, Lawley et al 16 demonstrated that the resolution of hLIBS-based geochemical imaging was sufficient to map a suite of kimberlite-hosted mantle xenoliths in Nunavut (Canada). In particular, LIBS was particularly sensitive for mapping the microscale distribution of elements with low atomic number, e.g.…”