Recent advances in laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy for explosive analysis

Explosives analysis has a significant practical application in the areas of national public security, anti-terrorism, stability maintenance, criminal investigation, national defense and military industry, and environmental protection. There may be some restrictions for conventional explosive detection and analytical techniques, such as excessive sample preparation complexity or specific security issues. However, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) has several promising advantages, including easy sample pretreatment, trace substance identification, rapid analysis speed and standoff detection, and has been used in explosive analysis. This review summarizes the basic principles of LIBS and its development and application in the field of hazardous explosives in recent years. In more detail, it introduces the identification of inorganic and organic explosives under the interference of various substances, fingerprint identification of explosives, and standoff detection of explosives. It also includes using LIBS and laser-induced air shock from energetic materials technique to predict the potential performance of explosives (detonation velocity, the heat of combustion, detonation energy, detonation pressure, etc.). Finally, some future directions for LIBS are proposed. It will help readers to better understand the current research status of the LIBS technique in explosive analysis.