DECONVOLUTION OF NEUTRON-SCATTERING DATA - A NEW COMPUTATIONAL APPROACH

In this paper we address the problem of reconstructing the scattering function S-Q(E) from neutron spectroscopy data which represent a convo lution of the former function with an instrument dependent resolution function. It is well known that this kind of deconvolution is an ill-p osed problem. Therefore, we apply the Tikhonov regularization techniqu e to get an estimate of S (E) from the data. Special features of the n eutron spectroscopy data require modifications of the basic procedure, the most important one being a transformation to a non-linear problem . The method is tested by deconvolution of actual data from the IN6 ti me-of-flight spectrometer (resolution: 90 mu eV) and simulated data. A s a result the deconvolution is shown to be feasible down to an energy transfer of approximate to 100 mu eV for this instrument without reco gnizable error and down to 220 mu eV with 10% relative error.