The half-life of He⁶

Abstract

The decay of He⁶ was measured, with a plastic scintillation counter, over a period of 10 half-lives. The data were obtained by photographing two scalers, one of which registered the β counts while the other, operating on a 60 Hz signal, served as the clock. After suitable corrections for background, dead-time of the counting system, and pulse height dependence on counting rate, 34 separate runs were combined. A least squares fit to the data gives a value of $\text{T}{}_{\mathrm{<mtext>1</mtext><mtext>2</mtext>}}\text{= (0.797 ±0.003)}\text{sec}$.