Determination of Beta Decay Ground State Feeding of Nuclei of Importance for Reactor Applications

Understand

In $\beta$-decay studies the determination of the decay probability to the ground state of the daughter nucleus often suffers from large systematic errors.

• The difficulty of the measurement is related to the absence of associated delayed $\gamma$-ray emission.
• In this work we revisit the $4\pi\gamma-\beta$ method proposed by Greenwood and collaborators in the 1990s, which has the potential to overcome some of the experimental difficulties.
• Our interest is driven by the need to determine accurately the $\beta$-intensity distributions of fission products that contribute significantly to the reactor decay heat and to the antineutrinos emitted by reactors.