Measurement of the half-life of ^79Se with accelerator mass spectrometry

The accelerator mass spectrometry(AMS) is an effective method for the determination of the half-life of long-lived radionuclides. In this paper, we report a method for measurement of the half-life of79 Se. The number of79 Se atoms was determined from measured79Se/Se absolute ratios with the AMS system at the China Institute of Atomic Energy and the decay rate of79 Se was determined by counting the emitted β-rays with a liquid scintillation spectrometer. The major improvements of our measurements include using the high abundance of an79 Se sample which was cooled for many years to exclude the interference of short-lived nuclides, the extraction of SeO-2molecular ions, that results in a suppression of the79 Br background by as much as about five orders of magnitude. Also, an AMS measurement of the absolute ratio of79Se/Se was developed to avoid systematic errors. The results show that79Se/Se is(2.35±0.12)×10-7in the reference sample and the radioactivity of79 Se is(1.24±0.05) Bq/g, so the half-life of79 Se is(2.78±0.18)×105a.