New chemometric approach MCR-ALS to unmix EPR spectroscopic data from complex mixtures

Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectra of mixtures are often difficult to interpret due to the superposition of spectral contribution of various species present in the complex materials. It is challenging to accurately identify the number of pure compounds present and to extract their pure spectra. In this study, the powerful chemometric method, multivariate curve resolution-alternating least squares (MCR-ALS), is applied to identify different paramagnetic centers. This method is used to simultaneously extract, with no prior knowledge, the pure spectra and the corresponding concentration profiles of all the compounds in the unknown and unresolved mixtures. The goal of our work is to apply, for the first time, this new chemometrics methodology, MCR-ALS, on EPR spectroscopic data in order to characterize a series of distinct but strongly overlapping spectra of various paramagnetic species.