JOURNAL OF ANALYTICAL ATOMIC SPECTROMETRY, JUNE 1986, VOL. 1 163 Atomic Spectrometry Viewpoints Klaus Dittrich Sektion Chemie, Karl-Marx Universitat Leipzig, 7010 Leipzig, Talstr. 35, GDR Whilst attending one of the Post CSI Symposia at Meersburg, FRG, in September 1985, Professor J. M. Ottaway interviewed Doz. Dr. Sc. Klaus Dittrich on behalf of JAAS. We are running a series of interviews in JAAS and are hoping that leading atomic spectroscopists will give us their views of the current scene in atomic spectroscopy. We are very grateful to you for agreeing to this interview and perhaps you would like to start off by telling us a little about your education, when you arrived in Leipzig and how you came to work in the field of atomic spectroscopy. Thank you for the invitation to give this interview for JAAS.I hope my views are of some interest to your readers. I studied at Karl Marx University in Leipzig in GDR from 1956 to 1961 and obtained a scientific degree Diploma. I then worked as an Assistant, at the same University, in the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry, and worked in the field of complex formation chemistry. After 4 years, in 1965, I successfully defended a thesis in this field and obtained the scientific degree of Doktor rer. nat. I then did postdoctoral studies at Leipzig and also with Professor Jatsimirsky in the Soviet Union, and began to work in the field of atomic spectroscopy in 1968. Initially my work was concerned with atomic absorption, but I have subsequently moved into other fields. This early background in basic analytical chemistry has obviously stood you in good stead in your later career. How did you continue in the field of atomic spectro- scopy? My initial studies in the field of atomic spectroscopy concerned atomic absorp- tion with electrothermal atomisers.Ini- tially we constructed home-made atorn- isers of the rod type and later the tube type. We started studies on interference effects, especially in the gas phase of graphite tubes. Alongside this we worked in the field of atomic emission spec- trometry using arc discharges and devel- oped a method of laser AAS. We were particularly concerned with the determi- nation of trace elements in solids using laser atomisation, and also in the study of interferences during evaporation and the effect of electron concentrations in the arc discharge.We also developed methods of plasma diagnostics, especially for non- steady state plasmas with spectral photo- graphy in combination with photographic equidensitometry. We obtained know- ledge about the structure of arc discharge plasmas using these techniques. At this time we started work in the field of atomic fluorescence spectrometry using home- made electrodeless discharge lamps as light sources. In 1977 I had my second thesis defence and obtained the scientific degree, Doctor of Science in the GDR. This is similar to the old German degree, Doctor Habile which was altered in our country in 1968 to Doctor of Science. You obviously work in the Department in Leipzig, headed by Professor Gerhard Werner. Could you explain your position in the Department and your current responsibility for atomic spectroscopy developments?164 JOURNAL OF ANALYTICAL ATOMIC SPECTROMETRY, JUNE 1986, VOL.1 From 1961 to 1965 I was Scientific Assis- tant at Leipzig University and from 1965 to 1971 I was a, so-called, Ober Assistant. After I obtained my second degree I was promoted to the position Dozent for analytical chemistry in the University. Originally I was a member of the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry at my University, which was headed at that time by Profes- sor Holzapfel. More recently (1968), however, the Chemistry Department (Sektion Chemie) in the University was founded and a new division of Analytical Chemistry was established with Professor Werner as its Head. In this division of the Department I am now the Head of Inorganic Analysis.For the past week you have attended the 24th Colloquium Spectroscopicum Inter- nationale first in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and now in Meersburg. How do you view the success, or otherwise, of the CSI in West Germany ? It was a very great pleasure for me to receive an invitation from the organisers of the 24th CSI to present a paper at the Colloquium in Garmisch and also to attend and present a paper at the Sympo- sium on Innovations in Atomic Absorp- tion held here in Meersburg. The Confer- ence was extremely interesting and I learned many new things about atomic absorption and about electrothermal AAS. I also heard some new ideas on plasmas, which I think will benefit my research in our Department in Leipzig. I particularly enjoyed the organisation of the CSI into invited lecture papers and intensive discussions around the rest of the papers presented as posters.Fewer people probably pay attention or attend a particular poster, but this form of presen- tation is particularly effective because it allows detailed discussion between parti- cipants who are actively interested in specific topics. I personally enjoyed the discussions on atomic absorption tech- niques the most, but this reflects my own particular interests. This form of presen- tation will probably be adopted for the conferences that we organise in GDR, Analytiktreffen. At the next Analytik- treffen I will be organising invited papers plus poster papers and finally round-table discussions after the poster sessions.I think this form of discussion is most effective if there are no more than 100 people present. However, if there are 400 people to discuss a particular topic it is not so effective. You have mentioned the meetings on atomic spectroscopy organised in East Germany. I have been fortunate enough to attend two of these meetings held in Finsterbergen and Neubrandenberg and I must say that I have found them most enjoyable. I know that you are organising another meeting in September 1986. Would you like to say something about the organisation of this meeting? We have been very pleased with the participation at these meetings by your- self and other international colleagues. Our next Conference will be held in Neubrandenberg again, Analytiktreffen 1986. The Analytiktreffen series take place every year but the topic of the Conference changes in consecutive years.We try to have an atomic spectroscopy meeting every four years. In 1986 we have combined Analytiftreffen with the CANAS Conference series. CANAS is the Conference on Analytical Atomic Spectroscopy and has traditionally been a conference of some of the socialist coun- tries, i.e., Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria and GDR, which is organised for the direct information of the spectroscopists in these countries. The 7th CANAS Meeting was held in Hungary in 1982 and the 8th was in Czechoslovakia in 1984. Consequently our Analytiktreffen in 1986 will be combined with the 9th CANAS Meeting. Because of this combi- nation of meetings, we are expecting a stronger international participation than usual.The Conference has an official name, i. e., “National Conference with International Participation,” and will include about 50-60 invited lecturers from all over the world. The planning is at an advanced stage and I am sure the meeting will be interesting. I have learned much from this present CSI and, as I have mentioned before, hope to include some of the ideas in terms of the organisation that I have gleaned from this meeting. Personally I have always found the Analy- tiktreflen Meetings most enjoyable and have particularly appreciated the high degree of international participation. Apart from invited papers do you welcome contributed papers from other participants in Western Europe, for example? Yes; we welcomed other people from Western countries to increase the degree of international participation at the ear- lier meetings.The Conference has many delegates from Eastern European Social- ist Countries and we would also welcome guests from the West. I am very glad to include this in our interview as I believe your Conference is an excellent opportunity for scientists in the West to meet many Eastern European delegates. In my opinion it is one of the best vehicles for developing East - West contacts and cooperation. Perhaps you could give us some idea of your current research interests and where you see them leading you in the future. It would be particularly interesting to our readers if you could tell us something about the developments in the field of molecular absorption in graphite furnaces.electrothermal atomisation we have deve- loped a new method of analysis based on molecular absorption spectrometry using electrothermal evaporation. We have been developing new methods for the determination of contaminants in metals using molecular absorption and to do this work we have continued to develop and construct our own instrument systems. More recently we have managed to obtain a FANES system (furnace atomic non- thermal excitation spectrometry), which was developed by Heinz Falk and his colleagues at the Central Institute of Optics and Spectroscopy of the Academy of Sciences in GDR, and we have been able to measure molecular emission in the FANES system. The new method is called MONES (molecular non-thermal excita- tion spectrometry). We are also continu- ing our work in the field of laser excited atomic fluorescence spectrometry, most recently with an electrothermal atomiser in the form of a furnace tube.We believe this represents some of the earliest work in laser AFS to make use of graphite furnace atomisers. Our recent work has made it possible to use molecular fluores- cence for the determination of non-metals and we refer to this technique as LAMOFS (laser excited molecular fluorescence spectrometry) with ETE (electrothermal evaporation). In our research at Strathclyde University we work quite closely with industry in the UK and we find this very helpful to our fundamental research interests. I wonder whether this happens in East Germany? Do you find it very easy to work with industry and do you get many problems to investigate from industry? In the Analytical Chemistry Center of Karl Marx University in Leipzig we cover most of the analytical techniques of interest and in all areas we have attemp- ted over the years to develop new analy- tical methods in collaboration with other institutions and also with industry.We certainly do not work in the field of routine analysis and we never analyse routine samples, but we do help other institutions, including industry, in the development of new analytical tech- niques. As you know from my own publications I have been concerned recently with the development of new analytical methods for the determination of trace elements in semiconductor materials. This work was carried out to help the semiconductor industry in the GDR, and has been concerned mainly with the determination of Group IV and Group VWII elements.For these three Groups the analytical problems have been rather different. As an example of this work we have developed a molecular Our main research interest has always absorption spectromet;ic method with been in the field of trace analysis using electrothermal atomisation for the deter- microsamples. As a result of a detailed mination of chlorine in semiconductor study of interferences by molecules in materials. Another m-oblem concernedJOURNAL OF ANALYTICAL ATOMIC SPECTROMETRY, JUNE 1986, VOL. 1 165 the determination of germanium and tin and the removal of interference effects with some semiconductor elements. Here you have problems if you want to dissolve these samples in an acid medium mainly composed of hydrochloric acid.The el- ements of interest are very volatile in the hydrochloric acid medium and we had to develop alternative procedures for dissol- ution. A further example concerns a layer by layer analysis of semiconductor materials in collaboration with an Institu- tion of the Academy of Sciences in the USSR. We have used chemical etching with anodic oxidation and also layer by layer removal using a diamond knife t o analyse different segments of the semi- conductors. Much of the work I have mentioned briefly here is related to specific problems found in industry in our country, and it is always our intention to support industry as far as we can but without offering a routine analysis ser- vice.Thank you for giving us some insight into your research at Leipzig. On behalf of JAAS, I wish your conference in Neubran- denberg in September 1986 every success and hope that as a result of extra publicity more people from the West come to participate in this very enjoyable series of meetings. It is very nice to see you at a Conference in Western Europe and I very much hope we will have the opportunity of seeing you at SAC86fBNASS in July. Stanley Greenfield Department of Chemistry, University of Technology, Loughborough, Leicestershire L El 1 3TU, UK Whilst in Hawaii attending the 1986 Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry, the Editor took the opportunity to discuss with Professor Greenfield his recent trip to China. Professor Greenfield following his favourite pastime Chinese style (in this case eating Peking Duck) When did you actually go to China and for how long? I left the UK on the 13th November, 1985, and returned on the 5th December, 1985.What was the main purpose of your visit and who had invited you? I was asked to give an Invited Lecture at the 1st Beijing Conference and Exhibition on Instrumental Analysis, held in Beijing. The invitation came from Professor Huang Benli, whom I know quite well, on behalf of the Spectroscopy Society of China of which body he is Vice President. Can you tell us something about the Conference you attended, your lectures and your audiences? The lecture I gave at the conference, where the official language was English, lasted about an hour. My topic was my work at Loughborough University on atomic fluorescence spectrometry with plasmas.I gave a similar lecture at The Research Institute of Mining and Metal- lurgy in Beijing where, with translation, it took two or three times as long. I gave another lecture at a place just outside Beijing, The Fragrant Hills but I am afraid I cannot recall the name of the establishment. I had an audience of about 700 people, so I was told. I didn’t count them personally! The lecture rooms were not heated and I gave my lecture in my overcoat-the audience were in their overcoats as well. The projection facilities were rather simple, a sheet thrown over a curtain pole for a screen. Was it purely an atomic spectroscopy meeting? Well no, there were six main streams with many sub-divisions. The main streams were, Spectroscopy, Mass Spectrometry, Electron Microscopy, Chromatography, Spectroscopy at Radio Frequency and Microwave (NMR, EPR, NQR) and a General Section.There were some well known participants, for example, John Knox of Edinburgh, Paul Boumans from Philips Research, Ted Rains of the NBS and John Beynon of Swansea. I attended all the atomic spectroscopy sessions. 1 would say that the standard was similar to that of the sessions at this Conference. The Chinese make a very attentive audience. They clearly lack experience in presenting their work to Western audiences whose presentations tend to be more sophisticated, aided, as they usually are, by better equipment. Were you given the opportunity to.look around their research facilities or was any of it restricted? I think I was shown most things.I can’t say for certain that they didn’t keep something secret but I didn’t get that impression. They seem to spend a fair amount of money on buildings. Some of their Institutes are quite large. They are not badly provided for as far as equipment is concerned. They have a sprinkling of stuff that appearsold fashioned to Western eyes, but also some modern equipment. Were most of their instruments imported or are they doing a lot of instrument develop- ment themselves? Well so far as I could see most of their present instruments are imported. As regards ICPs a lot of their early work is based on my first papers; they have done much as we did, taking commercial gener- ators, which would be Chinese, and simply retrofitting them to spectrometers.Was this your first trip to China? No, it was my second visit. I was impressed with the Chinese the first time I went and nothing has happened to alter my opinion, and what’s more I think they are catching up fast. It is not necessarily what one would expect. People give one the impression of being well fed and well clothed, a bit drab to us perhaps but well clothed and they have a roof over their heads and they seem quite happy. Do you want to say something about this “catching up” which is a result possibly of their positive action of sending researchers abroad especially to the US and the UK? One thing of interest possibly is that I was approached by one or two students or would be students who were enquiring whether the British Government would fund them to come and do work over here in the Universities. They were certainly keen to come and learn at our Institu- tions.One finds that a lot of people speak English well and there is a keenness to learn and practise English. When we went to Hangzhou my wife and I were walking along the side of the lake and were suddenly surrounded by Chinese, young people who simply wanted to speak English, and some of them, I might add, spoke it very well indeed. Do you think there are more Chinese students coming over to America to study than to the UK? There are now, because the UK overseas students fees were raised dramatically in 1983. Previously we were quite com- petitive in getting students because we were cheaper than the US but now they tend to go to the US.Apart from anything else it is a case of proportions. There are far more universities in the US. We have a fair sprinkling of Chinese and Malaysian students at Loughborough, and inciden- tally they have a good reputation.166 It is a complex subject, but it does have far reaching effects because the foreign students studying in the UK go back to their own countries and then use British instruments, British journals, etc. , which is a good thing. I was invited to quite a large banquet in the People’s Great Hall, I would say that all the top scientists were at this banquet. There would have been about 50 or so people present, Our host on this occasion was Professor Yan Ji-Ci, the Vice Chair- man of the Standing Committee of the People’s Republic of China. During the preliminaries, while we drank tea in an audience room, he gave a talk, and the essence of this was a plea for co-operation between the sicentists of the Western World and Chinese scientists and particul- arly asking for exchange of literature.Professor Yan Ji-Ci is a well known physicist who was educated at the Sor- bonne and is very Westernised. What about the students, do they have a free choice of what they want to study? I don’t know, but I would imagine not, and I also think that they have to finance themselves. That was certainly the impression that I got. I was speaking to people whose friends or they themselves had had to give up a course because they have had to support themselves. I think in China you have to work for what you get, a fact of which I don’t entirely disapprove.Did you travel about and get to see very much of China? Yes. I came down from Beijing to Hangz- hou, and then to Shanghai and Suzhou, back to Hangzhou, Guilin, Guangzhou (Canton) and then to Hong Kong. As you go south from Beijing down towards Canton it gets more and more Wester- nised. In fact Canton is not all that different from Hong Kong. I went on some fascinating trips, such as on the Grand Canal at Suzhou, which is just like Piccadilly Circus during the rush hour, the road is the river and the cars, boats. When I was in Guilin, which is another fascinating place, I gave a lecture at the Research Institute of Geology for Mineral Resources, The China National Non- ferrous Metals Industry Corporation- which is quite a mouthful! I gave my conference lecture which lasted for about an hour and a half and then I had to ad lib.for another one and a half hours to fill the time alloted. Does this qualify me for a place in the “Guiness Book of Records”? Possibly not. We know about your great interest in food: did you have some good meals on your visit? Oh yes. There are four main cuisines in China: Beijing (Peking), Suzhou, Can- JOURNAL OF ANALYTICAL ATOMIC SPECTROMETRY, JUNE 1986, VOL. 1 tonese and the hot one, Sichuan. In the North, whether it is because it is less Westernised, one tends to have all food served in dishes on a big revolving table. One has a single plate, and one eats everything off the same plate. Now so far as I am concerned eating, as it were, Sole Bonne Femme and Chateaubriand steak from the same plate is, to say the least of it, a little off-putting.As one moves down towards Hong Kong the presentation of the food gets better. In Canton one has one’s food in individual dishes one after another and also the Suzhou and Can- tonese cuisine is of a higher standard than Beijing. (I shall lose all my friends in Beijing over this!) It is a very difficult matter. I have no doubt that the indivi- dual dishes and the Chinese cooking and cuisine is of a high standard, but one has to get accustomed to this way of eating. What about alcohol? So far as the beer is concerned the first bottle is all right but after that it palls rapidly. Some of their white wines are respectable, not out of this world, but respectable. Their red wines are not too good, in my opinion.They have a parti- cular distilled rice wine which they use for making toasts and frankly there is only one way to drink that and that’s straight down the hatch! However, one can get all the usual western drinks. Can you give us some general impressions of the people and the country? I gained the impression that the average Chinese works extremely hard especially out in the fields and in the factories. I did get round a few factories, not to give lectures but to look at them. They work extremely hard, but in the hotels one gets a rather different attitude and it is not easy to sort out why this is. It could be a communication problem because a lot of them understand English much better than they speak it. There are those who pretend they understand English but one knows they don’t, which is off-putting.There is another possible explanation and that is that they are all state employees so there is no real advancement in these places, there is also the possibility that as they are pretty independent people, the idea of waiting on foreigners is not their idea of fun. It is difficult to sort out but one certainly needs all the patience one can muster in the hotels. But in the fields and the factories they work like stink, they really do. Were all these chemical factories? No. I went round a silk factory, which was most interesting and I went round a fan factory and a jade factory. Judging by the papers presented at the conference, is all their research geared towards industry or is some of it purely academic? I think judging by most of the papers I attended that it is largely geared to industry, but there is some academic work.There were for instance papers on excitation mechanisms but it is certainly largely project orientated I would say. Presumably a lot of it is still geared to traditional industries such as steel manu- facturing? Yes, steel, minerals, ceramics. Is the predominant chemistry spectroscopy do you think? Well the actual conference, as I have said, was on instrumental analysis and with the six streams there was a fair coverage of analytical chemistry in general. Do you think over the next few years we are going to see a lot more Chinese coming out of China to the West? It is already happening but I think it is largely a question of finance.There are some visitors from the People’s Republic here at this Conference, such as Professor Wang. I don’t get the impression that they are restricted overmuch. There are obvi- ously restrictions but I have travelled a fair amount in the Iron Curtain countries and China is totally different. We have had quite a bit of interest in JAAS from China, and I have received a number of good papers, although a couple were in Chinese. Did they generally make you very wel- come? Are they a kindly people? Yes they are, they are kindly and they laugh. They laugh at themselves which is a welcome change; they are a happy lot. If you are out especially if you stray off the main street, people come up and talk. They can hardly believe that there is anyone as large as I am! They poke me to make sure I am real! They are very friendly yes, very friendly, and by and large helpful too.In conclusion I should say that I thor- oughly enjoyed my trip to China and very much hope to return someday and stay longer. Thank you for taking time off at this busy conference to tell us about your experiences and impressions of China. Having said that, we certainly could not have chosen a betterplace (Hawaii) to take time off, and I hope you manage another trip to China in the not too distant future.JOURNAL OF ANALYTICAL ATOMIC SPECTROMETRY, JUNE 1986, VOL. 1 167 ASU Highlights The ASU review in this issue describes the progress made in the last 12 months in the development of instrumentation for atomic spectroscopy. There has been considerable interest in the use of echelle spectrometers in ICP-OES to provide sufficiently high resolution to alleviate the worst effects of spectral interferences. One of the most significant advances in the area of high-resolution spectroscopy has been the application of Fourier trans- form spectrometers in ICP-OES since this approach also provides the analyst with information from the entire spectrum.Inductively coupled plasma mass spec- trometry is clearly becoming established as a trace analysis technique. Conse- quently, there has been a more realistic appraisal of the advantages and limi- tations of the technique with respect to interference effects, although it is evident that the optimum instrumental configura- tion has yet to be established. Lasers have featured prominently as light sources for AFS and have been used with flame, ICP and electrothermal atomisers for extremely sensitive measurement of a range of elements. Laser ablation has attracted considerable attention as an alternative method of sample introduc- tion to the ICP, as has electrothermal vaporisation, and consequently spec- trometers have been modified to accom- modate the transient signals thus pro- duced. In AAS, there has been increasing use of continuum light sources which allow the possibility of simultaneous multi- element analysis. The development of constant temperature type electrothermal atomisers continues to be an area of substantial activity, but no such system has yet been introduced on a commercial basis. The enormous impact of microcorn- puters on all aspects of instrumentation for atomic spectroscopy hardly needs to be highlighted, and considerable research effort is being expended in this area, particularly by instrument manufacturers. John Marshall ICZ, Middlwbrough, UK