A measurement of the half-life of the superallowed Fermi decay 46V(β+ 46Ti and a study of some systematic errors involved

The half-life for 46V positon decay has been determined with high precision. Particular care has been taken to eliminate systematic effects introduced by inappropriate data analysis methods, by the presence of contaminant activities and by the occurrence of pulse pile-up in the electronic system. The final result obtained is 422.28 ± 0.23 ms, which is significantly lower than the presently accepted value.