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A new measurement of the 122Sb half-life

Published

Author(s)

Giancarlo D'Agostino, Marco Di Luzio, Nicholas Sharp, Massimo Oddone

Abstract

Following significant discrepancies observed in rescaling collected 122Sb -peak count rates to a reference time by decay corrections, we looked at the literature supporting the presently recommended 2.7238(2) d 122Sb half-life value. The reading highlighted that the evaluators selected the most recent value of an inconsistent set of data published without reporting details of the experiment and the uncertainty budget. In order to check possible errors we performed a new measurement by recording the 122Sb decay of neutron activated antimony samples using state-of-the-art -detection systems characterized in terms of efficiency drift and random pulse pile-up. The measurement was carried out in two different laboratories by applying the same method. The resulting 2.69457(39) d and 2.69368(28) d 122Sb half-life values are in agreement at the evaluated 10 4 relative uncertainty level but are significantly lower than the recommended value.
Citation
Metrologia

Citation

D'Agostino, G. , Di Luzio, M. , Sharp, N. and Oddone, M. (2021), A new measurement of the 122Sb half-life, Metrologia, [online], https://doi.org/10.1007/s10967-021-07793-x, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=931239 (Accessed October 9, 2025)

Issues

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Created June 5, 2021, Updated September 29, 2025
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