Evaluation of a direct injection nebulizer interface for flow injection analysis and high performance liquid chromatography with inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectroscopic detection

A direct injection nebulizer (DIN) was designed, developed, and evaluated to determine its potential utilization as an effective inter- face for flow injection analysis (FIA) and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) coupled with inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectroscopic detection. The analytical figures of merit for the DIN when used as an interface for FIA-ICP-AES were found to be comparable to or better than those obtained with conventional pneumatic nebulization in terms of limits of detection (LODs), reproducibility, linearity, and interelement effects. In the HPLC mode, the LODs were found to be comparable to those obtained by continuous-flow sample introduction into the ICP, or inferior by up to only a factor of four. Stable plasma operation was maintained for the DIN sample introduction of a variety of pure organic solvents, including acetonitrile, methanol, methyl- isobutylketone, and pyridine. The HPLC-DIN-ICP-AES facility was specifically applied for the speciation of inorganic and organo- metallic species contained in synthetic mixtures, vanilla extracts, and a variety of energy-related materials, such as shale oil process;water, coal extracts, shale oil, crude oil, and an SRC II. Suggestions for future research are also considered; (\u27(DAG))DOE Report IS-T-1227. This work was performed under Contract W-7405-Eng-82 with the U.S. Department of Energy

Gemini Planet Imager observational calibrations I: Overview of the GPI data reduction pipeline

The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) has as its science instrument an infrared integral field spectrograph/polarimeter (IFS). Integral field spectrographs are scientificially powerful but require sophisticated data reduction systems. For GPI to achieve its scientific goals of exoplanet and disk characterization, IFS data must be reconstructed into high quality astrometrically and photometrically accurate datacubes in both spectral and polarization modes, via flexible software that is usable by the broad Gemini community. The data reduction pipeline developed by the GPI instrument team to meet these needs is now publicly available following GPI's commissioning. This paper, the first of a series, provides a broad overview of GPI data reduction, summarizes key steps, and presents the overall software framework and implementation. Subsequent papers describe in more detail the algorithms necessary for calibrating GPI data. The GPI data reduction pipeline is open source, available from planetimager.org, and will continue to be enhanced throughout the life of the instrument. It implements an extensive suite of task primitives that can be assembled into reduction recipes to produce calibrated datasets ready for scientific analysis. Angular, spectral, and polarimetric differential imaging are supported. Graphical tools automate the production and editing of recipes, an integrated calibration database manages reference files, and an interactive data viewer customized for high contrast imaging allows for exploration and manipulation of data.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures. Proceedings of the SPIE, 9147-13

Direct Imaging of an Asymmetric Debris Disk in the HD 106906 Planetary System

We present the first scattered light detections of the HD 106906 debris disk using Gemini/GPI in the infrared and HST/ACS in the optical. HD 106906 is a 13 Myr old F5V star in the Sco-Cen association, with a previously detected planet-mass candidate HD 106906b projected 650 AU from the host star. Our observations reveal a near edge-on debris disk that has a central cleared region with radius 3c 50 AU, and an outer extent > 500 AU. The HST data show the outer regions are highly asymmetric, resembling the ''needle'' morphology seen for the HD 15115 debris disk. The planet candidate is oriented 3c 21deg away from the position angle of the primary's debris disk, strongly suggesting non-coplanarity with the system. We hypothesize that HD 106906b could be dynamically involved in the perturbation of the primary's disk, and investigate whether or not there is evidence for a circumplanetary dust disk or cloud that is either primordial or captured from the primary. We show that both the existing optical properties and near-infrared colors of HD 106906b are weakly consistent with this possibility, motivating future work to test for the observational signatures of dust surrounding the planet.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye