About the effectiveness of the ABPD methods in air-borne alpha-activity monitoring.

Abstract A modified version of the alpha–beta-pseudo-coincidence-difference (ABPD-M) method is proposed with a view to suppressing natural background radiation when measuring the transuranium radionuclide (TRU) content in aerosol samples. It is shown that complementing the traditional “pseudo-coincidence” method with a treatment of (comparatively) fast beta–alpha coincidences provides a means to significantly improve the suppression of background fluctuations and the accuracy of measurement results in comparison with the traditional method.