Determination of 62 Potential Impurity Elements in High-Purity Mercury Cadmium Telluride Powder by Glow Discharge Mass Spectrometry

To comprehensively evaluate the impurity element content in high-purity mercury cadmium telluride powder, this study mentioned by the title was conducted after systematically eliminating mass spectrometric interferences and optimizing test conditions including sputtering time, sample loading amount, discharge current, and discharge voltage. Using an indium strip as the auxiliary cathode material to load the high-purity mercury cadmium telluride powder （approximately 20 mg of sample loading amount） , glow discharge mass spectrometric analysis was performed under the parameter conditions （50 min of sputtering time, 1.6 mA of discharge current, and 850 V of discharge voltage） . Through mass spectrometric interference evaluation and blank tests, 8 interfered elements （iodine, cesium, lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, thallium, gold, and tantalum） were identified, and the relative contents of 62 potential impurity elements were calculated using the correction formula based on the abundance ratios, peak area ratios and relative sensitivity factor （RSF） ratios of the impurity elements to the matrix element tellurium. It was shown that the detection limits for the 62 potential impurity elements were found in the range of 0.01‒1 μg·g⁻¹. When the method was applied to actual sample analysis, 14 impurity elements （lithium, sodium, magnesium, potassium, aluminum, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, chlorine, calcium, titanium, iron, selenium, zirconium） were detected. In the analysis of a cathode copper standard sample, the absolute values of relative errors for all detected elements （except zinc element） were not greater than 50%, and RSDs （n=9） did not exceed 15%.