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Mass spectrometry: principles and instrumentation

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Book cover A Handbook of Silicate Rock Analysis

Abstract

During the early 1970s, neutron activation analysis in the determination of rare-earth elements perhaps had the most significant influence on the advancement of geochemical thinking, but there can be little doubt that a decade later this accolade was firmly transferred to mass spectrometry. The reason for this is that mass spectrometry is the only technique capable of inferring the geochemical history of samples right back to the age of accretion of the Earth. This arises not only from the possibility of interpreting mass spectrometry isochron data in terms of the age of a sample, but also from the very precise isotope measurements of, for example, inert gases contained in some meteoritic samples which can give data on the nucleo-synthetic processes pertaining to the origin of the universe.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Fellow in Earth Sciences, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

    P. J. Potts

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© 1987 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Potts, P.J. (1987). Mass spectrometry: principles and instrumentation. In: A Handbook of Silicate Rock Analysis. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-3988-3_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-3988-3_16

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-015-3990-6

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