An alternative method is to use liquid scintillation counting (LSC), where the sample is directly mixed with a scintillation cocktail. When the individual light emission events are counted, the LSC instrument records the amount of light energy per radioactive decay event. The alpha spectra obtained by liquid scintillation counting are broaden because of the two main intrinsic limitations of the LSC method: (1) because the random quenching reduces the number of photons emitted per radioactive decay, and (2) because the emitted photons can be absorbed by cloudy or coloured samples (Lambert-Beer law). The liquid scintillation spectra are subject to Gaussian broadening, rather than to the distortion caused by the absorption of alpha-particles by the sample when the layer of active material deposited onto a disk is too thick.