Quantitative analysis of lipids with argon gas cluster ion beam secondary ion mass spectrometry

Ar gas cluster ion beam (Ar‐GCIB) SIMS has been developed as one of the powerful tools used for analyzing organic materials because of the high secondary ion yield of large organic molecules due to ‘soft’ sputtering mechanism of this technique. However, for practical analysis of complex biological samples, high quantitative accuracy is strongly required besides high sensitivity. In this study, some pure and compound lipid samples were measured with our originally equipped Ar‐GCIB SIMS apparatus with the aim of determining the quantitative accuracy of this technique. It was found that the detection limit of the Ar‐GCIB SIMS apparatus was lower than 0.1%. In addition, there was almost no matrix effect between the organic substances of similar chemical structures. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.