Background subtraction from in-beam HPGe coincidence data sets

Algorithms for the subtraction of backgrounds from γ-γ matrices and higher-fold data sets, obtained from in-beam HPGe coincidence experiments with heavy-ion-induced nuclear reactions, are described. The backgrounds are parameterized as the cross-products of lower-dimensional projections of the data and a one-dimensional background spectrum. A novel method of correcting for a mixture of different reaction channels in the complete data set, by making use of one or more gates on background channels in the energy region of the “E2 bump”, is presented. In many cases, this new method provides a significantly better description of the background.