Comparison of unfolding methods for the inference of runaway electron energy distribution from gamma-ray spectroscopic measurements

Unfolding techniques are employed to reconstruct the 1D energy distribution of runaway electrons from Bremsstrahlung hard X-ray spectrum emitted during plasma disruptions in tokamaks. Here we compare four inversion methods: truncated singular value decomposition, which is a linear algebra technique, maximum likelihood expectation maximization, which is an iterative method, and Tikhonov regularization applied to chi(2) and Poisson statistics, which are two minimization approaches. The reconstruction fidelity and the capability of estimating cumulative statistics, such as the mean and maximum energy, have been assessed on both synthetic and experimental spectra. The effect of measurements limitations, such as the low energy cut and few number of counts, on the final reconstruction has also been studied. We find that the iterative method performs best as it better describes the statistics of the experimental data and is more robust to noise in the recorded spectrum.