Bayesian PIXE background subtraction

Abstract The subtraction of the X-ray background in a PIXE spectrum has been the subject of many investigations and different techniques have been developed. These techniques vary from filtering to fitting polynomial functions. The promising Bayesian Statistics technique has been used in this study to eliminate the background from the spectrum in a rigorous and self-consistent manner. We compare the results of the Bayesian background subtraction method to that obtained by stripping and the “rolling ball”; method.