The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Apr. 24, 2001
Filed:
Jun. 25, 1998
Gangqiang Li, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Thomas P. Doherty, San Mateo, CA (US);
Carl A. Myerholtz, Cupertino, CA (US);
Agilent Technologies, Inc., Palo Alto, CA (US);
Abstract
A technique that modulates the power of a inductively coupled plasma (ICP) according to the operative modes of a spectrometer. An analytical apparatus of the present invention contains an inductively coupled plasma generator (ICPG) and a spectrometer. The ICPG generates a plasma for forming ionic and excited molecular species from a sample. The spectrometer analyzes the ionic and excited molecular species formed. The spectrometer operates in an analysis mode wherein the ionic and excited molecular species are identified according to physical characteristics of the species to provide data on the species and further has a washout mode wherein the spectrometer flushes out interfering ions and molecules and provides no significant data on the sample. The controller modulates the ICPG to operate in power cycles, at each cycle the ICPG operates in an analysis period and a stand-by period. By modulating the plasma power, the power consumption and heat dissipation can be reduced. When such a power modulated plasma source is coupled to, for example, a time-of-flight mass spectrometer (TOFMS), high analytical performance can be achieved with simultaneous multi-element detection capability.