Radioactive Halflives
Add To your Report
- Show a plot of your Poisson data. Fitting the data is computationally difficult. Instead, determine the average count rate and its uncertainty. Is the estimated-width of the distribution approximately equal to the uncertainty? Does your data accurately represent a Poisson distribution?
- Use the two halflife measurements to determine what the original sample is. You can use this list of halflives. Note that we aren’t using crazy or exotic atoms that have incredibly large nuclear masses.
- Note that the data from the longer-lived isotope was not subtracted from the data before measuring the short-lived isotope. How would that affect the determination of the lifetime of the shorter-lived isotope?