You are a biological spectroscopist in grad school and are working at Argonne Na
ID: 890266 • Letter: Y
Question
You are a biological spectroscopist in grad school and are working at Argonne National Lab collecting X-ray absorption spectra. Some of your data is shown in the figure below in red. Your advisor said that he would never publish anything that looks as noisy as your data and is required you to improve your signal to noise significantly. After a lot of engineering, you come up with a new way to take multiple data sets during your beam time, which not only saves man hours (which saves money) but also improves your signal to noise so that your absorption spectra now look like the black spectrum in the figure below. Your advisor is eminently pleased and tells you to write a paper to submit your technique to the scientific journal Review of Scientific Instruments.
a. If the red spectrum represents one measurement, how many measurements did you have to collect and average to get the black spectrum?
After publishing this first paper, your advisor decided he wanted even better S/N. Since you are limited with your beam time and you have done everything you can think of to optimize the collection of data time-wise (so you can’t collect more runs to average in), you decide to try to address some sources of electrical noise. You cannot change the frequency of your signal or the bandwidth of the data being collected, those processes have already been optimized. But after some tinkering you finally improve your S/N to that in the figure below (black line).
Explanation / Answer
X-ray spectroscopy mainly involves in either Absorption i.e X-ray absorption spectroscopy or emittion i.e X-ray emittion spectroscopy.
X-ray absorption spectroscopy is used to a wide variety of bio-chemical research. It is used for the correlation between structure and function of metal sites in Metallo-proteins.
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