Glow Discharge Optical Emission Coded Aperture Spectroscopy

Glow discharge optical emission spectrometry (GDOES) allows fast and simultaneous multielemental analysis directly from solids and depth profiling down to the nanometer scale, which is critical for thin-film (TF) characterization. Nevertheless, operating conditions for the best limits of detection (LODs) are compromised in lieu of the best sputtering crater shapes for depth resolution. In addition, the fast transient signals from ultra-TFs do not permit the optimal sampling statistics of bulk analysis such that LODs are further compromised. Furthermore, commercial GDOES instruments rely on a slit-based light dispersion that favors high spectral resolution at the expense of light throughput. Here, a new technique called glow discharge optical emission coded aperture spectrometry (GOCAS) is shown to allow both a higher spectral resolution and higher light throughput by using a coded aperture (CA) with multiple thin slits at the spectrograph’s entrance to measure the convoluted spectra and compressed sensing (CS) algorithms to recover the deconvoluted spectra from the full field of view. The effects of CA characteristics on spectral reconstruction fidelity were studied and showed the best fidelity for smaller slits, 50% transmittance, and wider CA with a higher number of slits. In addition, Shearlet enhanced snapshot compressive imaging (SeSCI)_GPU showed the best performance of the CS algorithms studied, including SeSCI_CPU, two-step iterative shrinkage/thresholding (TwIST), and alternating direction method of multipliers total variation minimization (ADMM-TV). Moreover, GOCAS is shown to be very robust against increasing detector Gaussian noise. Finally, standard reference materials are used to show up to ∼30× improved S/N and an order-of-magnitude improved LODs, at the fastest acquisition times (fraction of a ms), which has the potential to be transformative for depth profiling of nanostructured materials.