ICP-OES, ICP-MS and AAS Techniques Compared

This article will briefly describe these three techniques, and point out the important criteria by which to judge their applicability to your own analytical problems. Table 1 below shows a checklist of common analytical requirements and may help in the assessment of the techniques. For many people with an ICP-OES background, ICP-MS is a plasma with a mass spectrometer as a detector. Mass spectroscopists would prefer to describe ICP-MS as mass spectrometry with a plasma source. Either way, the technique is capable of giving isotope information. This information can help to overcome many of the "spectral" interference problems that can occur in the mass spectrometer.