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Sometimes a radioactive nucleus decays into a nucleus which itself is radioactive. An example is

Assume that we start with 1000 38S nuclei at time . The number of is of count zero at and will again be zero at . At what value of , would the number of counts be a maximum?

Let the disintegration constants for and be and respectively.

rate of decay of rate of formation of

Integrating the above equation we get,