Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2020) 135: 756
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-020-00778-x

Regular Article

An alternative statistical approach to the collection and processing of Mössbauer spectroscopy data

Implementing the concept of count rate and applying Poisson statistics

¹ Physics Department, University of Ioannina, 45110, Ioannina, Greece
² Institute of Materials Science and Computing, University Research Center of Ioannina, 45110, Ioannina, Greece

^b adouval@uoi.gr

Received: 8 May 2020
Accepted: 14 September 2020
Published online: 23 September 2020

Abstract

The idea of recording the total history of a Mössbauer spectrum collection in carefully selected time intervals is introduced in this work, providing a potential to wield and interpret the mustered data using the novel-suggested experimental quantity of ‘count rate’, in comparison to the conventionally used experimental quantity of simple accumulated counts. The gain is a rich and detailed statistical set of data described by Poisson functions, that can be analyzed to reveal several characteristics, such as mean values and partial probability sums, providing different proposed experimental Mössbauer spectrum estimations. It is shown that the application of the proposed method affords improvements referring to line-width reduction and increase of signal to noise ratio to the resulting experimental ⁵⁷Fe Mössbauer spectrum estimations, in comparison to the corresponding conventional spectrum recorded by simply accumulating counts. Further improvement of the experimental spectral resolution is accomplished through the implementation of a proposed background filtering algorithm, whose validity is moreover tested on theoretical Mössbauer spectra containing simulated Poisson noise, where it was also found to be effective. The method is proposed to have applications to other similar experimental techniques that are based on estimating statistical mean values of experimental physical quantities.