On the variation of the 210Po half-life at low temperature

Experiments were performed to verify the possible influence of the temperature and source matrix on the half-life of (210)Po. Since the precise measurement of the activity of an alpha-emitting source at cryogenic temperature is far from trivial, a simpler approach was used: the activity of a (210)Po source was measured at ambient temperature, but in between the measurements, the source was cooled down during a few weeks in a liquid helium Dewar. A (210)Po solid source was prepared by electro-deposition on a silver plate. The activity of this source was first measured at room temperature, using the defined solid angle alpha measurement method. The source was then placed in a specific gastight container inside a liquid helium bath at 4 K during 28 days. Then the source was heated up and measured again using the same instrument in the same geometric conditions. The same experiment was repeated with the source coated with a thin layer of silver, in order to be sure that the radioactive material was fully embedded inside the metallic matrix. Our experiments showed no evidence of (210)Po half-life change at low temperature. A reduction of the half-life of (210)Po by 6.3% at low temperature, as claimed by Raiola et al. (2007), would have lead to a decay-corrected activity reduction of about 1% after 29 days, which would have been easily detectable. The paper describes the steps of this experiment and gives a detailed uncertainty budget for the measurements. The half-life of (210)Po obtained in each measurement is compared with the evaluated value of (138.3763+/-0.0017) d.