Analysis of gamma-ray spectra with spectral unmixing — Part I: Determination of the characteristic limits (decision threshold and statistical uncertainty) for measurements of environmental aerosol filters

International audiencePoisson-statistics based spectral unmixing has previously been shown to be anefficient analysis tool for the activity estimation of radionuclides from gammaray spectroscopy measurements. In this paper, we present the quantificationof characteristic limits (decision threshold, detection limit and limits of thecoverage interval) for the metrological use of such spectral unmixing algorithms.The proposed approaches are evaluated and validated with simulated spectra ofHPGe and NaI measurements by comparing the results to characteristic valuescalculated from Monte Carlo simulation