Efficient Computation of Radioactive Decay with Graph Algorithms

Abstract

This paper gives two graph-based algorithms for radioactive decay computation. The first algorithm identifies the connected components of the graph induced from the given radioactive decay dynamics to reduce the size of the problem. The solutions are derived over the precalculated connected components, respectively and independently. The second algorithm utilizes acyclic structure of radioactive decay dynamics. The algorithm evaluates the reachable vertices of the induced system graph from the initially activated vertices and finds the minimal set of starting vertices populating the entire reachable vertices. Then, the decay calculations are performed over the reachable vertices from the identified minimal starting vertices, respectively, with the partitioned initial value over the reachable vertices. Formal arguments are given to show that the proposed graph inspired divide and conquer calculation methods perform the intended radioactive decay calculation. Empirical efforts comparing the proposed radioactive decay calculation algorithms are presented.