CANDY, A COMPUTER-PROGRAM TO PERFORM AN ANDC ANALYSIS OF CASCADE CORRELATED DECAY CURVES

A computer program to perform an ANDC (arbitrary normalized decay curve) analysis with an arbitrary number of cascades is presented. It is argued that the most accurate and reliable lifetimes are obtained if the measured decay curves are smoothed by a multi-exponential fit prior to the ANDC analysis. The problem of combining measurements made at different energies is discussed and shown to be small, due to this smoothing procedure. Extensive tests of the program on both simulated and experimental data are reported and used to derive some criteria to test the validity of the ANDC results.