On-Line Transformations of High Resolution Spectra

A new technique has been drvised for transforming the pulse height distribution obtained from a lithium drifted germanium crystal used as a gamma-ray spectrometer into an energy, peak area vector. The computer operations required are simple enough to be performed by an on-line computer in about five seconds. The vector is generated from the raw pulse height distributed by the subtraction of a smoothed version of the raw vector. In order to remove the statistically insignificant portions of the differences, all values less than twice the square root of the original element of the data are set equal to zero. The only remanent of the Compton contribution to the raw data is a small peak at the Compton edge. The resulting vector may be plotted directly or further transformed to sum the area under each peak providing a convenient graphic or tabular means of presenting the gamma-ray energy and relative intensity information.