Se170063
PAA_Selenium/Soil_Experiments#Selenium_Sample_Analysis
Sample Description
The sample was placed in an aluminum cylinder that was to be irradiated. The target components consisted of a nickel foil on the front of the cylinder with 2 pure selenium pellets under the foil, but still outside the cylinder. Inside the target there was burnt sagebrush ash, which was burned with a blowtorch, and selenium. Below are the masses of the components
Nickel Foil: 0.2783g
Outer Se Pellets: 0.0971g
Sage Ash: 0.5111g
Inner Se Pellets: 0.0523g
Energy
The Calibration for Detector A was done on the morning of 5/23/17 with the MPA software using the thorium rods (as the calibration was fairly close already) and the correction values were found to be Det A Intercept = -12.208800 slope =1.021270
Halflife
Using the program /data/IAC/Se/May2017/5_25_2017/MPA.C, which is based off of Dr. Forest's analysis program, I was able to make a plot for the half life of the pure selenium sample, which is shown below.
The decay constant from the fit gives a half life of 59.14 +/- 0.6560 Minutes
Efficiency
Nickel Information
Activity
The window used during this investigation was [110,118]. I used the script on daq1 /data/IAC/Se/May2017/5_25_17/Eff.C which fits lines of interest to a Gaussian function plus a constant. Once this function is found, the constant is integrated across the window of interested, then subtracted out of the original equation. After that the Gaussian is integrated across the window which gives the total number of counts for the peak of interest (in this case it is the 93 keV line of Se-81). To find the error in the counts, I increased the value for the standard deviation by a factor of 3 and integrated that function across the region of interest and subtracted that value from the original number of counts. Below is an example of a spectrum seen when using Eff.C
Once the raw number of counts and the error has been obtained, before entering the value into a .dat file a few modifications were made to that number. The first and simplest modification is to convert the number of counts into activity simply by dividing by the time duration of the measurement. In other words
Since the radioactive decay equation is given by
So to get a linear equation, simply take the natural log of both sides, which gives
So we take the natural log of the activity and input that value into the .dat file. To propagate the error we take the error in the number of counts and divide by the time to put the error in units of Hertz. After that, since we are taking the natural log, we must use the standard error propagation formula, which is given by
Runlist
Table with dates and filename and locations on daq1