Study of radioactivity built-up and decay with singles time-stamped data

Time-stamped data have been used to estimate the decay half-lives of radioactive ^118mSb and ^64,66,68Ga nuclei. These nuclei are populated through the reaction ⁴He (E_lab = 32 MeV) + ^natIn and p (E0_lab = 1 MeV) + ^natZn, respectively. The γ-rays emitted by the excited daughter nuclei are detected by a single high purity germanium (HPGe) detector and the data are acquired using a CAEN 5780M desktop digitizer. Half-lives of different orders of magnitudes for the above mentioned nuclei are obtained from both the decay of parent and the growth of daughter nuclei. It is observed that the half-lives obtained from both these techniques match fairly well and also are consistent with the reported values. It is demonstrated that the time-stamped data can be useful while studying certain half-lives which are too long for measurement using in-beam electronic technique and too short for decay studies in off-beam methods. The data also have a special relevance for constant monitoring of beam current and beam-tuning.