Fifty years of plasma analysis and imaging, recollections and reflections

Abstract

Spectroscopic analytical methodologies are reviewed from a personal perspective, with special emphasis on plasma analytical techniques and imaging analysis. Selected examples from the laboratory experience of the author over his career illustrate the constantly increasing sophistication (sensitivity, specificity, spatial discrimination…) of analytical techniques over the last 4–5 decades, with an unfaltering evolution with ongoing scientific and technological progress, and, at particular occasions, unexpected and abrupt swerves in this uninterrupted development process.