Interval Halving

Interval Halving

Interval halving is a peak center procedure based on a peak crawl starting at the nominal peak position. The step size of the peak crawl is halved and the direction reversed whenever the count rate drops by more than a single standard deviation (square root of the intensity). The interval halving procedure is slow but extremely precise.

The initial peak step interval is always in a positive direction and the peak interval size is based on the Peaking Start Size as defined in the Peak/Scan Options dialog. Note that the default peaking start and stop sizes from the SCALERS.DAT file are modified by the following expression :

            Where :                      is the actual calculated step size

                                          is the spectrometer default start or stop size

                                         is the spectrometer high limit

                                         is the spectrometer low limit

                                        is the spectrometer on-peak position

                                      is the 2d spacing of the analyzing crystal

                                      is the 2d spacing for LiF (4.0267)

From this expression one can see that the actual start and stop sizes are unchanged at the spectrometer high limit when an LiF crystal is used, and are increased for lower spectrometer positions and larger crystal 2d spacings. The calculated start and stop sizes are also doubled when the crystal 2d spacing is larger than 30 angstroms (LDE crystals).

When the interval step size has been halved to a value less than the peaking stop size, the spectrometer is considered to be peak centered and the current position is saved as the new peak position.

If the number of intervals measured exceeds the "Maximum Peaking Cycles" as defined in the Peak/Scan Option dialog, the program terminates the peak center procedure with an error.