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Carbon-14. Carbon-14, C-14, 14C or radiocarbon, is a radioactive isotope of carbon with an atomic nucleus containing 6 protons and 8 neutrons. Its presence in organic matter is the basis of the radiocarbon dating method pioneered by Willard Libby and colleagues (1949) to date archaeological, geological and hydrogeological samples. Carbon-14 was ...
There are three naturally occurring isotopes of carbon: 12, 13, and 14. 12. C. and 13. C. are stable, occurring in a natural proportion of approximately 93:1. 14. C. is produced by thermal neutrons from cosmic radiation in the upper atmosphere, and is transported down to earth to be absorbed by living biological material.
Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon. The method was developed in the late 1940s at the University of Chicago by Willard Libby, based on the constant creation ...
Examples include carbon-14, nitrogen-15, and oxygen-16 in the table above. Isobars are nuclides with the same number of nucleons (i.e. mass number) but different numbers of protons and neutrons. Isobars neighbor each other diagonally from lower-left to upper-right. Examples include carbon-14, nitrogen-14, and oxygen-14 in the table above.
According to Byrne, [3] stable nuclides are defined as those having a half-life greater than 10 18 years, and there are many combinations of protons and neutrons that form nuclides that are unstable. A common example of an unstable nuclide is carbon-14 that decays by beta decay into nitrogen-14 with a half-life of about 5,730 years: 14 6 C → ...
On the other hand, carbon-14 decays by beta decay, whereby one neutron is transmuted into a proton with the emission of an electron and an antineutrino. Thus the atomic number increases by 1 (Z: 6 → 7) and the mass number remains the same (A = 14), while the number of neutrons decreases by 1 (N: 8 → 7). [5]
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Carbon-14 is formed in upper layers of the troposphere and the stratosphere at altitudes of 9–15 km by a reaction that is precipitated by cosmic rays. [67] Thermal neutrons are produced that collide with the nuclei of nitrogen-14, forming carbon-14 and a proton. As such, 1.5% × 10 −10 of atmospheric carbon dioxide contains carbon-14. [68]