Versatile software for semiautomatic analysis and processing of laser-induced plasma spectra B M.P. Mateo * , G. Nicola ´s, V. Pin ˜o ´n, J.C. Alvarez, A. Ramil, A. Ya ´n ˜ez Universidad de A Corun ˜a, Laboratorio de Aplicaciones Industriales del La ´ser E-15403 Ferrol (A Corun ˜a), Spain Received 6 December 2004; accepted 16 May 2005 Available online 14 June 2005 Abstract The present article describes the main characteristics and operations of SALIPS (software for the analysis of laser-induced plasma spectra), a computer program designed for use in Spectroscopy. During the last years laser-induced plasma spectroscopy (LIPS) has grown in popularity and different applications have been developed in several fields. However, until now there is no software reported to perform the recognition of the elemental composition of a generic sample from its LIP spectrum, which must be achieved by hand in a tedious comparative process of experimental peaks with emission lines from databases. For this reason, a computer program that includes several tools to provide a semi-automatic identification of the peaks of a LIP spectrum has been developed. The program, written in Microsoft\ Visual Basic\ code, has a user-friendly graphical interface and is a flexible tool that enables to handle, edit, copy and print a quick presentation of the data including automatically the identification results in the graph. SALIPS also provides some physical properties of the elements and includes algorithms for performing the simulation of spectra. The potential of the program is illustrated with some examples. D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Laser-induced plasma spectroscopy; Spectrum analysis software; Peak identification; Simulated spectra 1. Introduction Laser-induced plasma spectroscopy (LIPS) is a well established technique for the analysis of different materials [1,2]: metals [3], ceramics [4], biological samples [5], aerosols [6], organic samples [7], etc. This technique provides qualitative and sometimes semiquantitative infor- mation about the elemental composition of a sample. In LIPS method, a pulsed laser beam is focused onto the sample surface to induce the ablation of the latter and to generate a plasma from the vaporized material. The excited particles present in this plasma emit radiation at specific wavelengths characteristic of the elements which compound the sample. This emission is collected and results in a spectrum which peaks must be identified by the spectro- scopist. At present, although some authors have cited the design of programmes for particular applications [8–10],a software for the analysis of generic experimental LIP spectra has not been reported yet and, therefore, the identification of the elemental composition of the sample is usually achieved by manual comparison of the spectrum peaks with emission lines provided by databases of different institutions like NIST [11] or VALD [12] under subjective criteria and without the help of additional tools. Sometimes this identification is not so evident and can be very tedious due to the complexity of LIP spectra because various elements can present a line at the same wavelength, the intensity of the lines change with experimental conditions, etc. After the identification process, the peaks of the spectrum are labelled by hand in a complementary graphic program like Origin\ or Excel to plot the final spectrum. On the contrary, several specific softwares have been reported for other spectroscopy techniques, such as gamma- ray spectroscopy [13], photoelectron spectroscopy [14], X- 0584-8547/$ - see front matter D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.sab.2005.05.010 B This paper was presented at the 3rd International Conference on Laser Induced Plasma Spectroscopy and Applications (LIBS 2004), held in Torremolinos (Ma ´laga, Spain), 28 September – 1 October 2004, and is published in the special issue of Spectrochimica Acta Part B, dedicated to that conference. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 981337400x3411; fax: +34 981337416. E-mail address: pazmateo@udc.es (M.P. Mateo). Spectrochimica Acta Part B 60 (2005) 1202 – 1210 www.elsevier.com/locate/sab