A resonance laser postionization secondary neutral mass spectroscopy (SNMS) system with a quadrupole mass spectrometer has been developed to investigate its fundamental process for quantitative analysis of metal alloys and compounds. The feature of our SNMS system is to bombard ions with low energy incidence. The energy dependence of Cr/Fe ratios and resonant enhanced multi-photon ionization spectra of Fe in three kinds of samples have been observed. These results indicate that the existence of oxygen may disturb the quantitative measurement due to the population change of a sputtered atom though oxygen irradiation could prevent selective sputtering and ion enhanced sub-surface redistribution in stainless steel. The measured depth profiles of Cr, Fe and Ni in the colored stainless steel have been in agreement with the reference values within a factor of about 2. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.