The multiple isotope material basis set (MIMBS) method for isotope identification with low-and medium-resolution gamma-ray detectors

Abstract

In this report we describe the multiple isotope material basis set (MIMBS) method for isotope identification and show that it can overcome limitations of ordinary response function fitting and the single isotope material basis set method (SIMBS) when applied to ideal simulated NaI spectra, for an example attenuator and isotope library. Our simulations demonstrate that ordinary response function fitting has difficult identifying isotopes when attenuation is a factor, and that the SIMBS method can fail when multiple isotopes are present, so the more computationally intensive MIMBS method may be required for these situations. Its effectiveness in analyzing more realistic spectra remains to be demonstrated.