Spectroscopy-07-01-2006

Featured products from the spectroscopy marketplace.

Spectroscopy previews all of the events and happenings at the 55th Annual Denver X-Ray Conference, to be held August 7-11 in Denver, Colorado.

A simplified risk analysis methodology is needed for the validation of commercial software used in the regulated laboratory. In this column, the author takes a look at two alternative approaches.

This tutorial reviews the mathematical models for dealing with interelement effects in optical emission and X-ray fluorescence spectrochemical analysis. Line overlaps and matrix effect corrections are examined.

The ion source is the heart of the mass spectrometer. In the ion source, ions are created from gas-phase neutral sample molecules, or preformed ions are extracted from solutions, and then sent into the mass analyzer of the instrument. The electron ionization (EI) source was the first source widely used for organic mass spectrometry (MS), and design, development, and optimization of this source are all the result of the work of many of the early pioneers of MS.

The market for X-ray inspection in security applications has quickly developed from being virtually nonexistent three decades ago to becoming a market worth over $1 billion in 2005. Airport security accounts for the majority of the demand for this market, which consists of a number of variations of X-ray technology.