On causes of experimental lifetime discrepancies of excited atoms and ions

The influence of cascade transitions on the accuracy of lifetime determinations is analysed. On the basis of experimental and theoretical studied of the cascade effect it is shown that the increase in the number of cascade occupation always results in increasing the systematic error in the temporal decay technique. The total angular momenta of highly excited levels must be taken into consideration in the quantum state interferene technique. Sometimes errors may be negligible even for a large number of cascade transitions