Can software facilitate identifying half-life?

[ColoRad-o]

I have wrestled with trying to *search* these forums on "half-life" several ways, so am giving up.

I will shortly be trying to identify a nuclide with a half-life of around 46 minutes; I suspect 213Bi. It seems to me (saith someone whose gamma spectrometer is on order, who hath never used one OR the software) that I could, in principle, dial up an energy window around one of the bright expected gamma lines and watch the time evolution of the peak area, to ID the half-life.

Can anyone confirm that the some of the free software listed on the gammaspectacular site can be used to automate the identification of a half life, or at least log (as a time series) the count rates? Are there some particular programs you would recommend for this purpose?

Many thanks! --D. Wood

[Sesselmann]

David,

Yes, in PRA you can open the window called "Counting rate vs. time" and in the Data Acquisition and Analysis settings you can set any time interval you prefer for the histogram, you can then narrow it down further by selecting the energy region of interest.

The result should be a histogram showing an exponentially decaying count rate (assuming a reasonably short half life).