Nuclear Technology and Radiation Protection 2011 Volume 26, Issue 2, Pages: 164-170
https://doi.org/10.2298/NTRP1102164D
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Statistical treatment of nuclear counting results
Dolićanin Ćemal B. (State University of Novi Pazar, Novi Pazar)
StankoviĆ Koviljka Đ. (Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Belgrade)
Dolićanin Diana Ć. (State University of Novi Pazar, Novi Pazar)
Lončar Boris B. (Faculty of Technology and Metallurgy, Belgrade)
Since the exact time a specific nucleus undergoes radioactive decay cannot be
specified, nor can showers caused by secondary cosmic rays be predicted,
statistical laws play an important role in almost all cases of experimental
nuclear physics. This paper describes the method for the statistical
treatment of nuclear counting results obtained experimentally by taking into
account random variables pertaining to both frequent and infrequent
phenomena. When processing counting measurement data, it is recommended to
first discard spurious random variables that spoil the statistics by using
Chauvenet’s criterion, as well as to test if the results in the statistical
sample follow a unique statistical distribution by using the Wilcoxon
rank-sum test (U-test). The verification of the suggested statistical method
was performed on counting statistics obtained both from the radioactive
source Cs-137 and background radiation, expected to follow the normal
distribution and the Poisson distribution, respectively. Results show that
the application of the proposed statistical method excludes random
fluctuations of the radioactive source or of the background radiation from
the total statistical sample, as well as possible inadequacies in the
experimental set-up and show an extremely effective agreement of the
theoretical distribution of random variables with the corresponding
experimentally obtained random variables.
Keywords: counting statistics, Chauvenet’s criterion, U-test