Covariance analysis of gamma ray spectra

The covariance method exploits fluctuations in signals to recover information encoded in correlations which are usually lost when signal averaging occurs. In nuclear spectroscopy it can be regarded as a generalization of the coincidence technique. The method can be used to extract signal from uncorrelated noise, to separate overlapping spectral peaks, to identify escape peaks, to reconstruct spectra from Compton continua, and to generate secondary spectral fingerprints. We discuss a few statistical considerations of the covariance method and present experimental examples of its use in gamma spectroscopy.