Spontaneous fission half-life of 249Cf

The authors describe a method for determining the spontaneous fission half-life of Cf 249 which is comprised in the preparatory stages of berkelium 249 separation by extraction chromatography and in the analytic stages of the detection of fission fragments using dielectric track detectors consisting of polyethylene terephthalate and muscovite. The half-life was calculated in the basis of the mass and composition of the sample material, the exposure time, the recording efficiency, and the number of recorded fission tracks, and was determined to be (8.5 plus or minus 0.5) multiplied by ten to the tenth power years after averaging measurement results. The ratio of the probabilities of Cf 249 decay by alpha particle emission and spontaneous fission was calculated from the ratio of their respective intensities