A further note on the variance of a background-corrected OSL count

Abstract

Galbraith (2002) gave formulae for calculating the relative standard error of a background-corrected optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) count. This note extends those formulae to the case where the number of channels used to estimate the background is not necessarily a multiple of (and may indeed be less than) the number used to estimate the signal. The theoretical formulae are unchanged, but the estimate of the background is expressed in a more general notation and I comment further on how the Poisson over-dispersion may be estimated. I will use the same notation as in Galbraith (2002) and will repeat enough of the text there for this note to be selfcontained.