Pricing

Hourly fees
Hourly fees for using the PLASMA facility cover the cost of Ar, consumables, and instrument maintenance; fees begin when the plasma is lit and end when the plasma is turned off.

Novice
Novice also pay a daily rate for assistance from a skilled laboratory technician. During this training period, the technician will help to set up the instrument, develop new methods, and train the user to become self-sufficient at running the instruments independently. The Training fee is $100/hour, and the daily maximum is $750 (= 7.5 hour).

After Training
After initial training, users may run without continuous supervision by a lab technician, though until they become an expert instrumentalist they may still pay a setup fee so that the technician can set up the instrument for analysis at the beginning of each day. The setup fee is $100/hour. It normally takes ~2-3 hours for the Neptune, and 1 hour for the QQQ and the OES.

Additional Info
Additional technician time will be billed at a rate of $100/hour, for example with help preparing samples or running analyses without a user on-site.

Please note: 

The PLASMA facility provides use of instruments and technical support in setting up analytical runs, but we are not a full-service analytical lab with regards to producing finalized data. It is the responsibility of the users to choose the analytical methods and protocols which will yield high-quality data for their unique application, and to perform all post-processing of raw data for finalization. We are always willing to offer friendly advice on an ad hoc basis, and users have the option to pay for technical support for methods development. But final responsibility for data quality lies with users.