On Wednesday, June 05, 2013 02:55:25 PM you wrote:
Hi,
Sorry about that, I wasn't sure what the best format would be for these forums. I have converted the data to a different format that should hopefully be more friendly.
This has data in the following columns;
1 = real time clock 2 = Mono angle (requested) 3 = Energy (eV) 4 = I0 5 = I1 6 = I2 7-9 = blank 10-44 - fluor channels (SCA) 45-79 - ICRs for the det elements
The weights are arbitrarily unity, and the dark currents were not recorded (assumed zero).
I have also attached an averaged file generated using average 2.0 if thats more useful for people.
Jason, You replaced one large, unweildy file format with another large, unwieldy file format. You should consider yourself fortunate that I have taken the time to bother with you. The folks on this mailing list, myself included, are volunteers. None of us get anything for offering time to answer these questions other than a sense of community spirit and community service. It is completely unreasonable that you have asked your question in a way that required lots of work simply to understand the question. Had you been a little more thoughtful and a little less unreasonably demanding of the time of volunteer help, you could have converted your data files into simple, 2-column files -- energy and mu(E) -- that would have been trivially easy for your volunteer to examine. Instead, you first sent the data in one basically inscrutable format, then in a second similarly unwieldy format. Awesome. Such a good use of my time. Please read this: http://bruceravel.github.io/demeter/pods/help.pod.html When you are done, please follow the link to the article by Raymond and Moen and read that. Now that I've had my rant, I'll address your question. Attached is your Au nanoparticle data overplotted with a spectrum measured on a gold foil. Clearly your data is awful and probably unsalvageable. Without knowing all the details of your measurement, it is very difficult to know what went wrong. Given that the oscillations in your data are commensurate with those in the gold foil, it is unlikely to be a monochromator problem or a problem with pressure variations in the I0 ionization chamber. I also don't think you had an egregious problem with sample preparation. Problems that fall under the rubric of sample inhomogeneity tend to damp the oscillations rather than enhance them. Also sample inhomogeneity tends to fail to normalize mono glitches away. You data, while problematic, don't seem to have that problem. My guess is that you have a problem of detector linearity, but not saturation of the Ge detector. Saturation (aka pile-up, dead-time) also serves to damp the oscillations. Perhaps there is some sort of coupling in the signal chain between the Ge detector and I0? I'm knd of running out of ideas here.... The bottom line is that this is the sort of problem that needs to be recognized and addressed while still at the synchrotron. I don't see what you can do to correct this after the fact in a way that would leave your data defensible for publication. The slim silver lining is that this teaches an important lesson about evaluating data quality as it is being measured. B -- Bruce Ravel ------------------------------------ bravel@bnl.gov National Institute of Standards and Technology Synchrotron Methods Group at NSLS --- Beamlines U7A, X24A, X23A2 Building 535A Upton NY, 11973 Homepage: http://xafs.org/BruceRavel Software: https://github.com/bruceravel
