This plot shows the normalized decay curves for 1000 atoms and 10 atoms with a decay constant of 0.1. Notice that for N=1000 the curve starts very smoothly, but becomes more steplike as the number of atoms decreases.
Although this situation is rather unusual as we are dealing with a small number
of atoms and actually wait until all of them decayed, it is still instructive
how our virtual Geiger counter (WWW) would deal
with this
kind of decay.
While this sounds (.au 8k) like a Geiger counter, it is
important to note that this is a simulation produced by equations and not
the recording of a real Geiger counter. It is nice to hear the decay change
from exponential to stochastic as single nuclei decay.
Figure 1: Exponential and spontaneous decay