We use an array of transition-edge sensors, cryogenic microcalorimeters with 4 eV energy resolution, to measure L x-ray emission-line profiles of four elements of the lanthanide series: praseodymium, neodymium, terbium, and holmium. The spectrometer
also surveys numerous x-ray standards in order to establish an absolute-energy calibration traceable to the International System of Units for the energy range 4 keV to 10 keV. The new results include emission line profiles for 97 lines, each expressed as a sum of one or more Voigt functions; improved absolute energy uncertainty on 71 of these lines relative to existing reference data; a median uncertainty on the peak energy of 0.24 eV, four to ten times better than the median of prior work; and 6 lines that lack any measured values in existing reference tables. The 97 lines comprise nearly all of the most intense L lines from these elements under broad-band x-ray excitation. The work improves on previous measurements made with a similar cryogenic spectrometer by the use of sensors with better linearity in the absorbed energy and a gold x-ray absorbing layer that has a Gaussian energy-response function. It also employs a novel sample holder that enables rapid switching between science targets and calibration targets with excellent gain balancing. Most of the results for peak energy values shown here should be considered as replacements for the currently tabulated standard reference values, while the line shapes given here represent a significant expansion of the scope of available reference data.
Straightforward methods for adapting the familiar chi^2 statistic to histograms of discrete events and other Poisson distributed data generally yield biased estimates of the parameters of a model. The bias can be important even when the total number
of events is large. For the case of estimating a microcalorimeters energy resolution at 6 keV from the observed shape of the Mn K-alpha fluorescence spectrum, a poor choice of chi^2 can lead to biases of at least 10% in the estimated resolution when up to thousands of photons are observed. The best remedy is a Poisson maximum-likelihood fit, through a simple modification of the standard Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm for chi^2 minimization. Where the modification is not possible, another approach allows iterative approximation of the maximum-likelihood fit.
