Template-free Pulse Height Estimation of Microcalorimeter Responses with PCA

Abstract

We present a template-free method of estimating pulse height of micro-calorimeter signals based on principal component analysis (PCA). The method is shown to improve the resolution on a simulated dataset by 25\% compared to the standard filtering technique that uses the averaged pulse as an estimation for the signal template. This technique is useful for reconstruction of pulses in micro-calorimeters with a high degree of pulse-shape variation where finding the correct signal templates is difficult.