The GammaSpec Package for Automated Gamma-ray Analysis (V.1.0)

Abstract

This report describes the GammaSpec package, a tool developed to automate the analysis and comparison of gamma-ray spectra. The goal of this tool is to drastically reduce, or even eliminate, currently time consuming processes for comparing large sets of gamma-ray measurements. There are a number of potential applications for this work throughout the laboratory, but particularly within Global Security. Current work flows where large numbers of measured spectra must be compared for anomolies and outliers often consist of loading and visually inspecting individual spectra, or utilizing small-batch tools. One such example is the PeakEasy tool also developed at LANL. PeakEasy has a robust and tested feature set for calibrating, identifying, and fitting gamma-ray spectra. However it’s intention was not for batch processing and automated comparison of large numbers of spectra. This tool is not intended to replace PeakEasy in an analyzers arsenal, but to instead augment it. The intention here is to automate the isolation of spectra of particular interest, which can then be studied in further detail. This report is arranged as follows. Section 2 lays out the design goals and desired functionality of the package. Section 3 describes the algorithms developed and chosen to accomplish those goals. Section 4 describes the primary interaction with the tool, as well as it’s resulting output. Following these sections, results are presented from a set of example datasets from High Purity Germanium (HPGe) detectors in Sec. 5. Finally, the current status is summarized in Sec. 6.