THE TOTAL INTERNAL CONVERSION COEFFICIENT OF THE 279-kev TRANSITION FOLLOWING THE DECAY OF Hg²⁰³ AS MEASURED BY A NEW COINCIDENCE METHOD

Using a new coincidence method, the total internal conversion coefficient for the 279-kev transition following the β-decay of Hg 203 has been measured with a standard deviation of about 1%. The method which employs a 4πβ–γ coincidence arrangement is based on the differential absorption of β-particles and conversion electrons in 4π geometry. For determining the absolute efficiencies of γ-ray spectrometers or ion-chambers, the method has the advantage of yielding directly the number of γ-ray quanta emitted per Hg 203 disintegration without requiring any knowledge of the K:L:M conversion ratios. Likely sources of systematic error have been investigated and their effect has been shown to be smaller than the quoted standard deviation. The value obtained is α = 0.2262 ±.0019 or γ/β = 0.8155 ±.0015, in excellent agreement with the recent β-ray spectrometer measurements of Nijgh et al. This is of interest because a number of widely differing values of conversion coefficients for this transition have been reported. If the K/(L+M+N) conversion ratio of 2.60 ±.06 found by Nijgh et al. is combined with our total conversion coefficient, a value α K = 0.1633 ±.0017 is obtained.