Noise in Radioactive Series Decays

Undergraduate #31
Discipline: Chemistry and Chemical Sciences
Subcategory: Chemistry (not Biochemistry)

Raquel Laing - Florida Memorial University
Co-Author(s): Huisso Ayivi and Monique De Leon, Florida Memorial University, Miami Gardens, FL

---

Naturally radioactive decay series have become an important scientific tool to determine the activity of the parent through the daughter or granddaughter activities under a given radioactive equilibrium. They are used in many applications, particularly in nuclear medicine where the low energy released from the daughter decay is of great importance. The gamma radiation (140 Kev) emitted by Technetium-99m which is the daughter of Molybdenum-99 provides a high resolution image but unfortunately, the emission of this low energy gamma ray can be affected by the noise in the parent decay series. We use decay series equations, especially the double decay rate equation to determine the activity correlation function, and the fluctuations in daughter activity. The evaluated spectral density of the noise in daughter activity showed to be directly associated to the fluctuations in the parent decay activity in the secular equilibrium.

Funder Acknowledgement(s): National Science Foundation

Faculty Advisor: Huisso Ayivi, Ahuisso@fmuniv.edu

Role: During this research my partner and I manipulated data using the decay series equation to calculate the fluctuations in activity between the parent and daughter radionuclides. We were also responsible for researching all background information to validate our data reveal the source for possible errors.