Dear All, I acquired Cd L3-edge spectra of some binary and ternary mixtures in varying proportions and for the individual components. Then, I tried to fit the reference spectra to the spectra of the mixtures using linear combination fitting of Athena to get their abundance. However, results were disappointing despite all spectra were carefully energy calibrated and normalized, so I decided to create simple mathematical ternary mixtures by summing up the spectra of the individual reference spectra (edge step normalized) and tried the fitting again to exclude mixing-failures and check sensitivity of LCF with the idealized spectra. Unfortunately, LCF was also not able to reliable deconvolute these spectra into the individual reference spectra. Does anybody have an explanation for that? It would be nice if somebody could give me information about the mathematical fitting algorithm implemented in Athena. Thanks a lot! Wishes, Nina