PHA - Integral vs Differential

[BenjaminWade]

Hi all
I am wanting to draw on everyones wisdom again, and apologies if this has been discussed before. I have used the search function and couldn't find anything on it.

I was just interested in what peoples philosophy is for the two different modes. I know some purely use integral for everything and rely on interference corrections to get rid of their higher order overlaps, and some use a combination of both integral and differential. I am about to set up a monazite method again (using Julien Allaz great pdf). In the past we used differential mode for a lot of the elements in our monazite method, and was wondering if this is still the case for the most part?

Cheers

[John Donovan]

There is no downside to using differential mode as long as you leave the baseline and window "loose".  On the Cameca instrument that would be 0.5 for the baseline and 4 or so for the window (9 or so for JEOL instruments).

The advantage is reduction of higher order interferences like 2nd order sodium K-alpha on oxygen.