Mass-spectrometric determination of iodine-129 using O2-CO2 mixed-gas reaction in inductively coupled plasma tandem quadrupole mass spectrometry

Abstract

This paper presents a mass-spectrometric method for determining the radionuclide iodine-129 (¹²⁹I) from the significant amount of interference in inductively coupled plasma tandem quadrupole mass spectrometry (ICP-MS/MS) using a dynamic reaction cell passing a mixture gas of O₂ and CO₂. Thus far, mass spectrometry analysis of trace amounts of ¹²⁹I has been hampered by the presence of xenon-129 (¹²⁹Xe) and the formation of polyatomic ions from excess amounts of stable isotope ¹²⁷I. In this study, flowing a mixture gas of O₂ and CO₂ into the dynamic reaction cell (Q2) successfully removed both ¹²⁹Xe interference and polyatomic interference (¹²⁷IH₂) in the analysis of ¹²⁹I in ICP-MS/MS. The resulting ratio of (background noise of m/z 129)/¹²⁷I was 4.6 × 10^-10 ± 3.3 × 10^-10, which enables the analysis of 10 mBq/L of ¹²⁹I in the presence of 100 mg/L of stable ¹²⁷I without chemical separation. The detection limit of this method was 0.73 mBq/L (= 0.11 ng/L) with an APEX-Q sample inlet desolvation device. For demonstration purposes, spike and recovery analysis of rainwater was performed, and good agreement between the spiked and recovered amounts was achieved.

Keywords: Dynamic reaction cell; Inductively coupled plasma tandem quadrupole mass spectrometry; Iodine-129; Mixture gas.