ABSTRACT
Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP MS) is rapidly conquering the field of element-selective detection in gas chromatography (GC) despite the presence of a number of cheaper, sometimes even more efficacious, but less versatile competitive techniques, such as flame photometry, atomic fluorescence, atomic absorption, or atomic emission spectrometry [1]. The pioneering works on the GC-ICP MS coupling go back to the mid-1980s with the landmark papers of Van Loon et al. [2] and Chong and Houk [3]. Since then, the ICP quadrupole MS has been undergoing a constant improvement leading to a wider availability of more sensitive, less interferenceprone, smaller and cheaper instruments, which favors its use as a chromatographic detector. The combination of capillary GC with ICP MS has become an ideal methodology for speciation analysis [4] for organometallic compounds in complex environmental and industrial samples because of the high resolving power of GC and of the sensitivity and specificity of ICP MS [510]. Indeed, the features of ICP MS-such as low detection limits reaching the one femtogram (1 fg) level, high matrix tolerance allowing the direct analysis of complex samples (such as gas condensates), or the isotope ratios measure-ment capacity enabling accurate quantification by isotope dilution-position ICP MS at the lead of all the GC element specific detectors.
