Measuring nuclear reaction yields in a procedure based on decay chain analysis

The problem of finding nuclear reaction yields in activation experiments is analyzed. It was shown that in the presence of complex decay chains the activity of gamma-spectrum lines of the nuclei can be described with a linear statistical model. Since the covariance matrix is unavailable the iteratively reweighted general least squares method is an appropriate means of obtaining a maximum-likelihood estimation. The relationship between the variances of estimated yields and the duration of spectrum measurements is discussed.