ABSTRACT
Inductively coupled plasmas (ICPs) are by far the most common type of plasma sources used in today’s commercial ICP optical emission (ICP-OES) and ICP mass spectrometric instrumentation. However, it was not always that way. In the early days, when researchers were attempting to find the ideal plasma source to use for spectrometric studies, it was not clear which approach would prove to be the most successful. In addition to ICPs, some of the other novel plasma sources developed were direct current plasmas (DCPs) and microwave-induced plasmas (MIPs). Before I go on to describe the ICP, let us first take a closer look at these other two excitation sources.
