Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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. [1]
In this situation it is generally uncommon to talk about half-life in the first place, but sometimes people will describe the decay in terms of its "first half-life", "second half-life", etc., where the first half-life is defined as the time required for decay from the initial value to 50%, the second half-life is from 50% to 25%, and so on. [7]
One may integrate over the phase space to obtain the total decay rate for the specified final state. If a particle has multiple decay branches or modes with different final states, its full decay rate is obtained by summing the decay rates for all branches. The branching ratio for each mode is given by its decay rate divided by the full decay rate.
In principle a half-life, a third-life, or even a (1/√2)-life, could be used in exactly the same way as half-life; but the mean life and half-life t 1/2 have been adopted as standard times associated with exponential decay. Those parameters can be related to the following time-dependent parameters:
The biological half-lives "alpha half-life" and "beta half-life" of a substance measure how quickly a substance is distributed and eliminated. Physical optics: The intensity of electromagnetic radiation such as light or X-rays or gamma rays in an absorbent medium, follows an exponential decrease with distance into the absorbing medium.
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.
Half-life has units of time, and the elimination rate constant has units of 1/time, e.g., per hour or per day. An equation can be used to forecast the concentration of a compound at any future time when the fractional degration rate and steady state concentration are known:
Caesium in the body has a biological half-life of about one to four months. Mercury (as methylmercury) in the body has a half-life of about 65 days. Lead in the blood has a half life of 28–36 days. [29] [30] Lead in bone has a biological half-life of about ten years. Cadmium in bone has a biological half-life of about 30 years.