Visual Nuclide Identification
HyperLab has a powerful quantitative isotope identification module, which is reliably identifies a large set of nuclei found in its nuclear database, determining activities of isotopes with overlapping peaks, while presenting the results in an exceptionally enjoyable visual manner.
This utility is also able to perform the identification on virtually any kind of gamma-spectrum producing phenomenon, e.g. prompt-gamma activation reactions, if the gamma intensity ratios are constant within a component to be identified.
Nuclide identification results
In HyperLab, the result of the nuclide identification is a list of activity concentrations or intensities for each component determined.
Components in HyperLab terminology may mean any kind of material, which provides a gamma line set with fixed relative intensities. The most common component is the radioactive decay. Other example would be any kind of gamma-producing reaction, e.g. the prompt-gamma capture, where the intensity ratios of the individual gamma lines are also constant within a capture reaction.
HyperLab's important concept is to fit the activity of all components together for a spectrum, and not activities at the individual components or spectrum peaks. Thus you will not see averaged activities calculated individually for each spectrum peak, just one common activity value, which is fitted to all of the peaks of all component at once.
Beside the activity concentrations, MDA values are also computed for gamma lines and for each component.
Requirements for nuclide identification
Well-calibrated measurement. In HyperLab's present version, only one measurement can be used for nuclide identification at a time. That measurement should have a relatively precise energy calibration, thus creating and using a nonlinearity curve is strongly recommended.
Efficiency curve. An absolutely calibrated efficiency curve is a requirement, if you want to get absolute component activity values in kBq (this is the case almost every time). If you have only relative efficiency curves, the nuclide identification can be performed, too, but the resulting values will be only dimensionless intensities.
Nuclear data. In case of decays, its is already in the database upon initializing. For prompt-gamma (or other, reaction-based) identification, you should import the reactions to your database. We are providing a default PGNAA library in the form of textual representation of reaction data, which can be installed by the user. These serve also an example for user-creatable reaction libraries.