Doppelkonversion

An excited nuclear state can decay by three different modes of double quantum emission, namely doubleγ-emission,γ-electron emission and double conversion electron emission. The emission of twoγ-quanta has been considered in an earlier paper¹. The purpose of the present work is to treat all three processes together in a systematic manner. It is shown that the connection between the transition rates forγ-electron emissionT _γc and doubleγ-quantum emissionT _γγ is more complicated than in the case of single quantum processes. However,T _γc can still be expressed in terms of the usual conversion coefficients. This is also true for the transition rate T_cc for the emission of twoK-shell electrons, although only approximately. For the emission of electrons from different atomic shells the formulas become rather complicated, because of interference effects. The electron andγ-quantum spectra in all of the three second order processes are discussed in detail for the decay of the isomeric level in Xe¹³¹.