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For example, the isotope copper-64, commonly used in medical research, has a half-life of 12.7 hours. If you inject a large group of animals at "time zero", but measure the radioactivity in their organs at two later times, the later groups must be "decay corrected" to adjust for the decay that has occurred between the two time points.
There is a half-life describing any exponential-decay process. For example: As noted above, in radioactive decay the half-life is the length of time after which there is a 50% chance that an atom will have undergone nuclear decay. It varies depending on the atom type and isotope, and is usually determined experimentally. See List of nuclides.
Terms "partial half-life" and "partial mean life" denote quantities derived from a decay constant as if the given decay mode were the only decay mode for the quantity. The term "partial half-life" is misleading, because it cannot be measured as a time interval for which a certain quantity is halved.
isotope is radioactive; it decays with a half-life of 1.248 × 10 9 years to 40 Ca and 40 Ar. Conversion to stable 40 Ca occurs via electron emission in 89.3% of decay events. Conversion to stable 40 Ar occurs via electron capture in the remaining 10.7% of decay events. [3]
The half-life of this isotope is 6.480 days, [2] which corresponds to a total decay constant of 0.1070 d −1. Then the partial decay constants, as computed from the branching fractions, are 0.1050 d −1 for ε/β + decays, and 2.14×10 −4 d −1 for β − decays. Their respective partial half-lives are 6.603 d and 347 d.
The radioactive system behind hafnium–tungsten dating is a two-stage decay as follows: 182 72 Hf → 182 73 Ta e − ν e 182 73 Ta → 182 74 W e − ν e. The first decay has a half-life of 8.9 million years, while the second has a half-life of only 114 days, [7] such that the intermediate nuclide tantalum-182 (182 Ta) can effectively be ignored.
Lutetium–hafnium dating is a geochronological dating method utilizing the radioactive decay system of lutetium–176 to hafnium–176. [1] With a commonly accepted half-life of 37.1 billion years, [1] [2] the long-living Lu–Hf decay pair survives through geological time scales, thus is useful in geological studies. [1]
This is a list of radioactive nuclides (sometimes also called isotopes), ordered by half-life from shortest to longest, in seconds, minutes, hours, days and years. Current methods make it difficult to measure half-lives between approximately 10 −19 and 10 −10 seconds.