Welcome to radioactivedecay’s documentation!
radioactivedecay is a Python package for radioactive decay calculations.
It supports decay chains of radionuclides, metastable states and branching
decays. By default it uses the decay data from ICRP Publication 107, which
contains 1252 radionuclides of 97 elements, and atomic mass data from the
Atomic Mass Data Center.
The code solves the radioactive decay differential equations analytically using NumPy and SciPy linear algebra routines. There is also a high numerical precision calculation mode employing SymPy routines. This gives more accurate results for decay chains containing radionuclides with orders of magnitude differences between the half-lives.
This is free-to-use open source software. It was created for engineers, technicians and researchers who work with radioactivity, and for educational use.
Contents:
- Overview
- Installation
- Tutorial
- Importing the package in Python
- Creating inventories of nuclides
- Radioactive decay calculations
- High numerical precision radioactive decay calculations
- Calculating total number of decays
- Nuclide name formatting and metastable states
- Fetching atomic and decay data
- Adding and removing nuclides from inventories
- Inventory arithmetic
- Multiplication and division on inventories
- Writing results to a file
- Plotting
- Theory and Computation
- API