Effect of the wavelength on laser induced breakdown spectrometric analysis of archaeological bone

Abstract

The analytical exploitation of the laser induced plasma suffers from its transient behavior due to some nonlinear effects. These phenomena are matrix-dependent and limit the use of LIBS to mostly semi-quantitative precision. The plasma parameters have to be kept as constant as possible during LIBS measurements. Studying archaeological bone samples using LIBS technique could be more difficult since these samples are less tough in their texture than many other solid samples. Thus, the ablation process could change the sample morphological features rapidly resulting in poor reproducibility and statistics. Furthermore archaeological bones are subjected to diagenesis effects due to burial environment and postmortem effects. In the present work comparative analytical study of UV (266nm) and IR (1064nm) LIBS for archaeological bone samples belonging to four ancient Egyptian dynasties representing the middle kingdom (1980–1630BC), 2nd intermediate period (1630–1539/23BC), Roman–Greek period (30BC–A.D. 395) and the late period (664–332BC). Measurements have been performed under identical experimental conditions except the laser wavelength to examine its effects. Elemental fluctuations within the same dynasty were studied for reliable information about each dynasty. The analytical results demonstrated that UV-LIBS gives a more realistic picture for bone elemental composition within the same dynasty, and bone ash could be more suitable as a reference material for bone calibration in the case of UV-LIBS.