28

Determining the Half Life of Al

Chloe Sole, Petro Janse van Rensburg, Kelebogile Bonokwane
SLXCHL001 - Chloe Sole
UCT PHY3004W
(Dated: May 29, 2017)
The half life of the very short lived aluminium isotope, 28 Al, was determined to being (2.285
0.027) minutes. The exponential relationship between the activation time and the radioactivity of
the source was plotted. All measurements were taken using a NaI scintillation detector.

1. INTRODUCTION ergy (1778.987 0.015) keV, [3]. This gamma-ray is the

primary ray we will be detecting.
28
Al is a very unstable isotope of aluminium and has a
short half life of 2.24 minutes. Because of this it is not a
N (t) = K(C0 et + B0 ) (1)
naturally occurring isotope and it has to be made through
neutron activation. We will be using a 241 Am9 Be ra- As mentioned in the introduction, the decay of 28 Al
dioisotopic source as our source of neutrons. Radioactive into 28 Si obeys the exponential radioactive decay curve,
isotopes characteristically decay exponentially. eq 1. In this equation K represents the other effects
The half life of a radioactive isotope is defined as the which would alter the count rate detected, such as detec-
time taken for a population of that isotope to have de- tor efficiency. B0 is the background radiation and C0 is
cayed to half of itself. This time scale can be obtained the initial activity of the source. is defined as the de-
from the decay curve of the isotope. cay constant and is related to the half life in the following
Neutron activation results in a induced radioactive iso- way: = ln(2)/t1/2 where t1/2 is the half life, [4].
tope which is unique in its energy spectrum and its half
life. This means that we can use neutron activation cou-
pled with analysis on the resultant isotopes radiation to 3. EXPERIMENTAL METHOD
determine the constituents in the sample being neutron
activated. Neutron activation has applications in envi-
ronmental sciences, forensics, medicine and other areas.
It is used in environmental sciences for air pollution, mer-
cury pollution and marine and freshwater studies, [1].

2. THEORY Water

Neutrons, unlike protons or electrons, are not affected Al Cylinders

by the coulomb barrier and can interact directly with
AmBe Source
the nucleus with considerably less effort. The probabil- suspended in
tube
ity that a neutron will interact with a nucleus is called
the interaction cross-section (). High energy electrons
enter matter with high speeds, not relativistic speeds,
and need to be slowed down in order for them to inter-
act with nuclei in other ways than just collisional. When
the neutron has been slowed down enough it will finally
be captured by a nucleus or enter into another type of
nuclear interaction, [2]. After absorbing the neutron the
FIG. 1: Setup of equipment for the experiment. On the left
resultant atom is in an excited state and hence de-excites
you can see the water bath with a tube through the center
to the ground state by releasing a gamma-ray. This atom of it. The AmBe source is suspended in this tube to keep it
is still unstable and through decay it decays into its dry and in the center of the 27 Al cylinders. The cylinders are
daughter particles. slid onto the tube and left to activate in the water bath. On
In our case the 241 Am9 Be source creates high en- the right we can see the electronic set up of the scintillator
ergy neutrons which get moderated by colliding with the detector and signal processing (front end electronics). The
atoms of the aluminium cylinders (27 Al) and water atoms detector is slid into the center of the Aluminium cylinders to
in the tank. The slower neutrons then get absorbed by then take data.
the 27 Al atoms and form an excited state of 28 Al which
de-excites by releasing a gamma-ray. This atom then To detect the decay radiation of 28 Al we used a scintil-
decays into Silicon releasing another gamma-ray of en- lation detector. The scintillation crystal was a thallium
 2

activated sodium iodide crystal of cylindrical dimensions, dwell time of 10sec. We expect to see the characteris-
5 cm diameter and 5 cm long. When a gamma ray inter- tic radioactive decay exponential and use a fitted curve
acts with the crystal a burst of light is produced and con- to obtain a value for the half life of 28 Al.
verted into a voltage. It is only converted into a voltage if After obtaining a value of our half life we then con-
its picked up by the attached photomultiplier tube. This trolled the length of time that the cylinders had for ac-
signal is then amplified and fed through an analogue to tivation. We then measured the counts per 10 second
digital converter which is analysed using a Multi-Channel interval, as we did above in MCS mode, per activation
Analyser (MCA) to order the data into a pulse height time. This allowed us to plot the activity of the alu-
spectrum. The amplified analogue signals are also sent minium cylinder as a function of activation time.
to a timing single-channel analyser (TSCA). The output
logic pulse from the TSCA is altered using a gate and
delay generator (GDG). This signal is used to gate the 4. RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
MCA and trigger the oscilloscope, refer to figure 1, [5].
For this experiment the radiative source (to create After calibration and windowing the pulse height spec-
the 28 Al through neutron activation) was a Americium- trum of 28 Al can be seen in figure 2. We can see that win-
Beryllium (AmBe) neutron source. The source was kept dowing a spectrum allows us to focus of specific gamma-
in a water bath for safety. rays of a desired energy. Note that despite the window
The electronics and detector-computer set-up was cal- there is an unexpected count in the low energy range.
ibrated using 137 Cs and 60 Co calibration sources. Our
voltage supply was set to 1.19kV . We used the 60 Co cal-
ibration source because 60 Co is known to have an energy
peak at 1.77M eV , [3]. This peak is close to the peak we
were expecting to see for the 28 Al pulse height spectrum.
This allowed us to ensure our settings for the electron-
ics would be correct for the 28 Al decay. Refer to table
I for the settings after calibration. After the calibration
was complete a pulse height spectrum of 28 Al was taken.
After being left in the water bath for a minimum of 30
minutes the aluminium cylinder was then dried. The de-
tector with the photo-multiplier tube attached to it was
then placed in the center of the Al cylinders. A pulse
height spectrum was recorded.

TABLE I: Table showing the calibrated settings before the

pulse height spectra was windowed.

NIM Section Setting Value

Amplifier Amp Gain 4.86 FIG. 2: Figure showing the resultant pulse-height spectrum
Coarse Gain 100 of 28 Al after the window energy range of 1650keV 1948keV
was selected. The red vertical lines indicate this range.
Shaping Time 1sec
Delay Amplifier Total delay 4.75sec
TSCA Up 10 Switching to MCS mode we took a number of data sets
Low 0.1 which all produced a similar curve to figure 3. This curve
Delay 1 sec
shows the exponential drop off of the rate of radiation
from the 28 Al and can be described by equation 1. Being
GDG Delay 0 sec
a counting experiment we know that our radiation count
rate is describable by Poisson statistics and hence we
From this pulse height spectrum we windowed the know that the uncertainty in each data point obtained is

pulse of the primary peak. This meant that we were given by ni where ni is the number of counts in bin i,
excluding any other detected events which were not the [6] [7] [8]. This estimate for uncertainty is only valid for
principal gammas energy. We obtained our window with a large number of counts per bin(10 sec interval). These
the upper limit of 1.55 and lower limit of 1.18. These uncertainties are shown by the grey lines in figure 3.
translate to an energy window of around 1650keV to The python module scipy.optimize was used to fit
1948keV which is centered around the principal gammas the data and obtain the best values for the parame-
energy of (1778.987 0.015) keV, [3]. After windowing ters along with the associated covariance matrix. The
the energies we were looking at we switched from PHA scipy.optimize.curve fit module uses the Levenberg-
mode (pulse height analysis) to MCS (multi-channel scal- Marquardt method for nonlinear best fit parameter
ing) mode which allowed us to obtain the counts per calculation, [9]. For more on this particular method
 3

TABLE II: Table showing the results of the exponential curve fit where we fitted N (t) = KC0 et + KB0 . K representing
factors which may affect count rate, such as detector efficiency. C0 is the initial activity of the source at the time of the first
measurement and B0 is the background count rate. is the decay constant which is used to calculate t1/2 (the half-life).
Data Set C0 K U(C0 K) B0 K U(B0 K) U() t1/2 mins U(t1/2 ) mins /dof Activation Time (min)
1 450.7 7.3 43.06 0.89 0.005017 0.000098 2.303 0.045 0.85 -
2 558.2 9.0 31.6 1.8 0.00508 0.00012 2.276 0.053 1.06 75
3 181.8 5.0 12.01 0.69 0.00522 0.00018 2.212 0.076 0.98 -
4 494.5 8.0 22.09 0.97 0.005107 0.000099 2.262 0.044 1.00 -
5 527.6 9.6 60.71 0.87 0.00511 0.00010 2.257 0.046 1.20 -
6 559.5 9.8 72.2 1.6 0.00514 0.00012 2.245 0.052 1.14 -
7 449.9 8.2 27.8 3.8 0.00532 0.00021 2.172 0.086 1.06 5
8 509.8 8.2 21.8 4.0 0.00524 0.00019 2.205 0.079 0.98 15
9 107.8 3.8 02.5 4.4 0.00444 0.00052 2.60 0.30 0.74 2.5
10 171.4 4.8 08.5 2.7 0.00538 0.00036 2.15 0.14 0.93 7.5
11 538.4 7.5 06.4 4.0 0.00497 0.00016 2.323 0.076 0.86 10
12 204.9 4.6 00.6 2.9 0.00462 0.00026 2.50 0.14 0.89 13
13 420.5 8.1 14.9 4.5 0.00505 0.00023 2.29 0.11 1.20 5
14 533.2 9.3 09.2 1.2 0.00519 0.00011 2.226 0.047 1.32 10
15 536.8 8.8 09.6 1.4 0.00501 0.00011 2.31 0.051 1.18 15
16 553.8 8.8 55.2 4.0 0.00517 0.00017 2.236 0.076 0.96 30

of best fitting refer to [10]. Instead of fitting equation 1

exactly we fitted a basic decaying exponential, as keeping
K separate from the C0 and B0 constants resulted in some
very unexplainable fits and unreliable parameters.
Fitting the basic decaying exponential to our different
data sets we obtained an estimate on the half life for each
data set we took, refer to table II. We chose to fit B0 K
rather than the average value we obtained when we took
background because the fit was much better and B0 K
varies per data set based on the conditions of when that
data set was obtained.
The uncertainties in the half lives calculated were
found using the uncertainty in obtained through the
curve fit, [11]. Because t1/2 = ln(2)/ the uncertainty in
t1/2 is

U ()
U (t1/2 = ln(2)/

The /dof analysis was conducted in a similar fashion

to the UCT 2nd year 2016 python laboratory 3, for a full
explanation refer to [12]. The desired value for /dof is
1, which indicates that the model is a perfect explanation
of the data. From table II we can see that the data sets
2, 4 and 7 are the best described by their model fits.
Taking an average of the calculated half lives we ob-
tained
t1/2 = (2.285 0.027)minutes
The uncertainty in this averaged value can be calcu-
lated in two ways. The first approach is statistical
FIG. 3: The top figure shows the data that was taken in
MCS mode with the calculated uncertainties. The best fit
line, calculated using SCIPY in python, resulted in B0 K =
43.06 0.89, C0 K = 450.7 7.3 and = 0.005017 0.000098.
From these best fitted parameters we get that t1/2 = 2.303
0.045mins and that our fit has a /dof value of 0.85 which
indicates that the fit suits the data well.
The bottom figure shows the residuals which we can see sta-
tistically fluctuate around zero indicating that our model fit
is sufficient.

p
where U (t1/2 ) = 2 /N , 2 being your variance of the
half lives and N being the number of data points (in our
case N = 16). The second approach is combining the
propagated uncertainties that we obtained in table II.
This is done by using the normal addition of values with
uncertainty rule and then division by a constant, [11]. It
can be shown that these two methods produced values of
the same order magnitude.
Because these two values had the same order of mag-
nitude and only differed by 0.001 counts per 10second
intervals, the second approach was implemented as the
uncertainty we are looking at is not purely statistical.
The data was also linearized and fitted it to a straight
line, refer to figure 4. Here we took into account our
background that we measured separately of each data
set.
B = (6.83 0.14)counts(10sec)1
Where B is the average background rate we obtained.
The uncertainty in this value was calculated usingp the
statistical approach mentioned earlier, U (B) = 2 /N .
All of the linearized data resulted in half life estimates
higher than expected. Because of this we focused primar-
ily on fitting the exponentials rather than the linearized
data.
FIG. 4: The top figure shows the data that was taken in
MCS mode linearized with the calculated uncertainties. The
best fit line, calculated using SCIPY in python, resulted in
C = 6.3240.017 and M = 0.0042710.000074. From these
best fitted parameters we get that t1/2 = 2.705 0.047mins
and that our fit has a /dof value of 1.54 which indicates
that the fit doesnt describe the data very accurately.
The bottom figure shows the residuals which we can see sta-
tistically fluctuate around zero indicating that our model fit
is sufficient in form.
4
From our fitted exponential models, table II, we took
the data sets 2, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15 and 16 (data sets
10 and 12 were omitted due to out-lier behavior) and ex-
trapolated the aluminium cylinders initial activity as it
left the water tank. This was done by solving for N (tb )
where tb is the time it took to get the cylinder to the
detector from the water bath per data set. The uncer-
tainties in these N (tb ) values were calculated by the
combined propagated uncertainties of the fitted values.
FIG. 5: Figure showing the activity of the aluminium cylin-
ders as a function of activation time (time spent in the water
bath). The fitting function being R(1 eta ), where R is re-
lated to the neutron flux, the interaction cross-section and the
number of 628Al atoms in the sample. = 0.30399, which is
the average , for a ta given in seconds, from our exponential
model fits. ta is the activation time in seconds. The best fit
R = 1297 2780.
This resulted in the uncertainty in N (tb ) being
q
U (N ) = u(C0 Ket )2 + u(B0 K)2
p
where u(C0 Ket ) = C0 Ket (u(C0 K)/C0 K)2 + u()2
These N (tb ) were then plotted against activation
time to give us figure 5. Using the same python model,
scipy.optimize.curve fit, we fitted the data to the
expected model of R(1 eta ), where R is the only fit
parameter and is our average from our exponential
fits.
Unfortunately this is clearly a terrible fit and an inac-
curate R. However to try and get an estimate for the neu-
tron flux we note the relation which defines R. R = Np
where Np = C0 past saturation, = (0.231 0.003)b and
is the neutron flux. Using Np = 1.11481 1026 2.22
1024 atoms we get = (50 108)neutrons/cm3 .

5. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
Our exponential fit to the plain data provided a much
more accurate fit and half life estimate of t1/2 = (2.285
0.027)minutes. This value is only slightly off of the ac-
tual value of 2.245minutes, [3]. Our data gave some
very strange results for the activity as a function of ac-
tivation time. I believe this is due to the fact that we
did not open the window when taking data sets 7-16
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5
as was recommended. Our plot for the activity of the
sample as a function of activation time, figure 5, showed
that the single parameter R was not able to account for
our data given our average ln(2)/ = 2.2855 0.027.
This resulted in massive uncertainty in our R value. So
much so that we are unable to comment on the neu-
tron flux as the uncertainty is greater than the value,
= (50 108)neutrons/cm3 . Had we had more time we
intended to retake data sets 7-16 with an open window.
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