A multielemental 3D laser ablationICP mass spectrometry mapping procedure was developed for high resolution depth information retrieval of surface layer phenomena. The procedure is based on laser drilling on a virtual grid on the surface, followed by extraction of depth maps along the z axis. Using a burst of 50 laser pulses at 1 Hz on each point of the grid, each laser shot was attributed to a specific voxel with a size of 90x90x0.15 um (glass matrix) and a content associated with 19 elemental concentrations (in ug/g). This approach is suitable for imaging with depth profiling (3D quantitative elemental imaging) of hard materials that can not be sliced (microtomed); such as concrete matrix and can be used to study the leaching, weathering or other surface phenomena of such samples/atrefacts. As a proof of concept, the approach was successfully used to investigate the degradation mechanisms of a medieval, weathered glass artifact by colocalization analysis of selected crosssectional 2D elemental images in arbitrary planes of the volume images.
COBISS.SI-ID: 5202714