Principle, Technology and Application of Total Evaporation Thermal Ionization Mass Spectrometry

Total evaporation thermal ionization mass spectrometry (TE-TIMS) has gradually gained recognition and application in the fields of nuclear industry, environment, geology and metrology due to its advantages including small sample dosage, good reproducibility, high accuracy and theoretically mass bias free nature. Due to the low thermal ionization efficiency and imperfect ion transmission, the establishment of TE-TIMS needs four prerequisites. Firstly, the ionization efficiency should be constant throughout the TE process. Secondly, the ion transmission efficiency should be constant throughout the TE process. Thirdly, the detection probability should be consistent for different isotopes. Fourthly, the ion loss before TE analysis should be negligible compared with the total signal. However, in practical, these prerequisites are difficultly satisfied completely, resulting in measurement uncertainty. In order to obtain more accurate TE-TIMS results, several improvements have been made during the last two decades, including introducing regular interruptions during TE process for ion-beam re-focusing, peak centering and peak tailing correction, combining with other mature methods, improving detector sensitivity, and establishing perfect uncertainty evaluation procedure, etc. In this review, the principle and the technical characteristics of TE-TIMS were introduced. Then, the methodology developments of TE-TIMS and its applications in nuclear industry, environment, geology and metrology were summarized. Finally, the development tendency of TE-TIMS was prospected.