Temporal-resolved measurement using a dual light-collection for laser induced breakdown spectroscopy

Abstract Temporal-resolved measurement plays an important role in laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), and intensified CCD camera (ICCD) is widely applied in this field. In this work, we proposed a simple way instead of ICCD to achieve temporal-resolved detection using a dual light-collection worked with 2 CMOS cameras or 2 fiber spectrometers. In the measurement, the cameras / spectrometers were simultaneously operated under two different detection-delay with respect to the pulsed laser, and a subtraction between 2 detections was carried out as the gate width to capture evolution of the plasma morphology or the emission intensity. With aid of this method, we have successfully obtained the dynamic change of plasma and the intensity variation of LIBS signal in the regime from nanoseconds to microseconds. As a comparison, ICCD and grating-spectrometer were also employed to confirm the obtained results. It is suggested that the proposed method is a practical way for temporal-resolved imaging or spectra detection for LIBS, and the on-site application would be the prospective field for this method in future.