Method of photon spectral analysis

TLDR: In this paper, a spectroscopic method to rapidly measure the presence of plutonium in soils, filters, smears, and glass waste forms by measuring the uranium L-shell x-ray emissions associated with the decay of plutonium was proposed.

Abstract: A spectroscopic method to rapidly measure the presence of plutonium in soils, filters, smears, and glass waste forms by measuring the uranium L-shell x-ray emissions associated with the decay of plutonium. In addition, the technique can simultaneously acquire spectra of samples and automatically analyze them for the amount of americium and γ-ray emitting activation and fission products present. The samples are counted with a large area, thin-window, n-type germanium spectrometer which is equally efficient for the detection of low-energy x-rays (10-2000 keV), as well as high-energy γ rays (>1 MeV). A 8192- or 16,384 channel analyzer is used to acquire the entire photon spectrum at one time. A dual-energy, time-tagged pulser, that is injected into the test input of the preamplifier to monitor the energy scale, and detector resolution. The L x-ray portion of each spectrum is analyzed by a linear-least-squares spectral fitting technique. The γ-ray portion of each spectrum is analyzed by a standard Ge γ-ray analysis program. This method can be applied to any analysis involving x- and γ-ray analysis in one spectrum and is especially useful when interferences in the x-ray region can be identified from the γ-ray analysis and accommodated during the x-ray analysis.