Statistical treatment of EPMA data collected from multiple spectrometers

[smatveev]

Hello everybody, how do you treat DLs (ppm) and errors for data acquired from multiple spectrometers?

[Probeman]

Hi Serguei,

The statistics for dealing with multiple spectrometers is really quite easy.  The best way to think of it is as though one is simply increasing the geometry efficiency of their detection system, so we only have to sum all the photons for each measurement from all spectrometers.

In Probe for EPMA we do this using the "aggregate" feature which sums the photon rates from each spectrometer (using the same emission line!) for both the on-peak and off-peak intensities. Then all the statistical calculations propagate through naturally.  This is described in detail in this paper here:

https://probesoftware.com/Ti%20in%20Quartz,%20Am.%20Min.%20Donovan,%202011.pdf

More discussion on aggregating duplicate elements here:

https://probesoftware.com/smf/index.php?topic=155.0

So the good news is that if we aggregate counts from multiple spectrometers appropriately, all our usual statistics apply to multiple spectrometers as before.