Hi,

I am a theoretical chemistry PhD student working on fitting experimental spectra with computed spectra in order to get a better understanding of the composition. In the LCF process with athena, I have found that when I allow "sum coefficients to 1", I get an unphysical negative coefficient of the last standard- after reading through the mailing list I understood why, and so no longer use that. The sum of my coefficients during the fitting now is close to 1- generally within the range of 0.95-1.1 at the absolute extremes, but more often around ~0.98- ~1.05.

In order to compare these coefficients, I renormalize them to 1, so they can represent the fractions of each component present. However, to test this I took the new normalized coefficients and summed up the standards with their respective weights to create this normalized "fit", and found that it is worse than the initial one. Is this something I should be concerned about when reporting the qualitative trends in how the composition changes? And if so, is there a better way to do the fits in a more normalized way?

Many thanks,

Patricia