Laser induced breakdown spectroscopy based on single beam splitting and geometric configuration for effective signal enhancement.

A new laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) based on single-beam-splitting (SBS) and proper optical geometric configuration has been initially explored in this work for effective signal enhancement. In order to improve the interaction efficiency of laser energy with the ablated material, a laser beam operated in pulse mode was divided into two streams to ablate/excite the target sample in different directions instead of the conventional one beam excitation in single pulse LIBS (SP-LIBS). In spatial configuration, the laser beam geometry plays an important role in the emission signal enhancement. Thus, an adjustable geometric configuration with variable incident angle between the two splitted laser beams was constructed for achieving maximum signal enhancement. With the optimized angles of 60° and 70° for Al and Cu atomic emission lines at 396.15 nm and 324.75 nm respectively, about 5.6- and 4.8-folds signal enhancements were achieved for aluminum alloy and copper alloy samples compared to SP-LIBS. Furthermore, the temporal analysis, in which the intensity of atomic lines in SP-LIBS decayed at least ten times faster than the SBS-LIBS, proved that the energy coupling efficiency of SBS-LIBS was significantly higher than that of SP-LIBS.