Evaluation of acid and alkali-fusion digestion techniques for determination of high field strength elements of geological samples by ICP-MS

Abstract

High field strength element (denoted as HFSE, including zirconium, niobium, hafnium and tantalum) serve as important tools in characterizing mantle reservoir and evolution processes. However, the determination of these elements for rock samples is particularly difficult, because they often reside in refractory minerals that are resistant to acid attack and are not chemically stable in simple nitric solution which is preferred in ICP-MS analysis. Trueness of Zr and Hf yielded from commonly used mixed acid digestion strongly are significantly subject to mineralogical composition of rocks. We improved both acid and alkali-fusion digestion methods to enhance the decomposition efficiency and to reduce blank and matrix effect for these two digestion techniques, respectively.