Methodologies for the determination of excitation temperatures for the argon support gas in six inductively coupled plasma systems are compared. These methods include a Boltzmann plot, partial Boltzmann plots, a polynomial fit, and a Fermi-Dirac model. The temperature(s) and fitting statistics are reported for each method. Additionally, the theoretical basis for each method is briefly reviewed. All these methods, with the exception of the first and last, yield multiple excitation temperatures; however, the Fermi-Dirac model more closely models the observed population distribution of excited electronic states in the argon atom.
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