Damon Green on the value of these collaborations

For many people at Teledyne Photon Machines the prime driver isn’t necessarily engineering the hardware, but the science behind it. That’s certainly my motivation. The laser ablation systems we develop and build are undoubtedly very well engineered, but are done so based on solid scientific foundations. I would argue that the science is the most important aspect of all of this and is learned only by building strong collaborative relationships with key academics and specialists globally and then using those relationship to properly test and fine tune the engineering needed to achieve the very best analytical performance. It’s a fascinating cojoining of commercial engineering and academic science.

Historically used as a tool to be coupled to mass spectrometers to measure trace metals in geological and environmental research, the technique has recently been shown to offer significant value to those analysing softer plant and tissue samples to further the understanding of metal behaviour in bio-systems. That lead to a discussion with scientists using IRMS based techniques for carbon and oxygen isotope analysis in wood who were keen to see if these laser ablation systems could be of benefit to their research. Requiring far less sample than traditional sample introduction techniques there is the added advantage of not only generating data at a very high spatial resolution, but also consuming such a small amount of material that the same sample can be analysed many times over.

I’m proud to say that by collaborating with Sercon and Terra Analytic we have pioneered the development of this fascinating new area of research and have already generated benchmark isotope data for a wide range of sample types that only a few years ago would have been simply impossible.