Remote laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy: Factors affecting analytical performance and instrumental and data-analysis strategies

Remote laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) enables rapid in situ multielement analysis of targets that are unsafe, inaccessible, or impractical to sample directly. This review first analyzes factors arising from or substantially amplified by remote operation, including laser-pulse delivery and focusing, target range and orientation, excitation–collection registration, return-light attenuation and receiver coupling, temporal delay and background, and wavelength-dependent attenuation and peak-power limitations in optical fibers. It then reviews approaches developed to improve remote analytical performance from both instrumental and data-analysis perspectives. Instrumental approaches include range-adaptive focusing, target acquisition and alignment, receiver and timing design, excitation enhancement, and stabilization of fiber-coupled and distal-head operation, whereas data-analysis approaches include path-aware line selection and normalization, distance-dependent correction and cross-distance modeling, calibration transfer, and transfer learning. Finally, representative applications are summarized in industrial process and infrastructure monitoring, hazardous and restricted-access environments, planetary exploration, cultural-heritage survey, and underwater and deep-sea analysis, highlighting the analytical tasks enabled when direct access or sample recovery is constrained. Taken together, this review connects measurement constraints imposed by remote operation with corresponding instrumental and data-analysis strategies and analytical outcomes, providing a task-oriented basis for system design, method selection, and performance evaluation.