5. Interference

5.1 Interference description

Like all analytical techniques, ICP-OES is not immune to a certain amount of interference, which is one of the limits to its performance.

Two types of interference can be identified:

• non-spectral interference due to matrix effects, which cause the signal to decrease or increase to varying degrees;

• spectral interference, which means that the signal of the analyzed line is more or less overlapped by the signal of another line, or by the presence of a spectral background.