BIAS IN MEASUREMENT OF FISSION-TRACK LENGTH DISTRIBUTIONS

Abstract

Problems in the measurement of fission-track length distributions include biases in various methods of sampling and the amount of information about the true lenght distribution that can be recovered. It is concluded that all length measurements are biased and that this bias must be corrected before meaningful geological interpretations can be made. It is recommended that track-length measurements in minerals be restricted to horizontal confined fission tracks, because the length bias is then simple and easy to correct. Projected track-length measurements are not recommended because of complicated bias and insensitivity to important features of the true length distribution. These points are i..