A new measurement of the 122Sb half-life
- Resource Type
- Authors
- Giancarlo D'Agostino; M. Di Luzio; Massimo Oddone; Nicholas E. Sharp
- Source
- Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry. 329:411-419
- Subject
- Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
Half-life
Uncertainty budget
010403 inorganic & nuclear chemistry
01 natural sciences
Pollution
0104 chemical sciences
Analytical Chemistry
010309 optics
Nuclear Energy and Engineering
0103 physical sciences
Statistics
Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and imaging
Standard uncertainty
Spectroscopy
Mathematics
- Language
- ISSN
- 1588-2780
0236-5731
Following significant discrepancies observed when decay-correcting 122Sb γ-peak count rates to a reference time, we looked at the literature supporting the presently recommended 2.7238(2) d (1σ) 122Sb half-life value as the source of these discrepancies. Investigation revealed that the value was derived from an inconsistent dataset and was published without reporting details of the experiment nor the uncertainty budget. In this work we performed a new measurement of the 122Sb half-life by measuring the 122Sb decay of neutron-activated antimony samples using state-of-the-art γ-detection systems characterized in terms of efficiency drift and random pulse pile-up. The measurement was carried out in two different laboratories with the same method. The resulting 2.69454(39) d and 2.69388(30) d (1σ) 122Sb half-life values are in agreement at the evaluated 10–4 relative combined standard uncertainty level but are significantly lower (1.07% and 1.10% lower, respectively) than the preexisting recommended value.