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Half-life (symbol t ½) is the time required for a quantity (of substance) to reduce to half of its initial value.The term is commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo radioactive decay or how long stable atoms survive.
Absorption half-life 1 h, elimination half-life 12 h. Biological half-life ( elimination half-life , pharmacological half-life ) is the time taken for concentration of a biological substance (such as a medication ) to decrease from its maximum concentration ( C max ) to half of C max in the blood plasma .
A more intuitive characteristic of exponential decay for many people is the time required for the decaying quantity to fall to one half of its initial value. (If N(t) is discrete, then this is the median life-time rather than the mean life-time.) This time is called the half-life, and often denoted by the symbol t 1/2. The half-life can be ...
The half-life, t 1/2, is the time taken for the activity of a given amount of a radioactive substance to decay to half of its initial value. The decay constant , λ " lambda ", the reciprocal of the mean lifetime (in s −1 ), sometimes referred to as simply decay rate .
The three long-lived nuclides are uranium-238 (half-life 4.5 billion years), uranium-235 (half-life 700 million years) and thorium-232 (half-life 14 billion years). The fourth chain has no such long-lasting bottleneck nuclide near the top, so almost all of the nuclides in that chain have long since decayed down to just before the end: bismuth-209.
Alternatively, since the radioactive decay contributes to the "physical (i.e. radioactive)" half-life, while the metabolic elimination processes determines the "biological" half-life of the radionuclide, the two act as parallel paths for elimination of the radioactivity, the effective half-life could also be represented by the formula: [1] [2]
The recession of 2020, was the shortest and steepest in U.S. history and marked the end of 128 months of expansion. Key Predictors, Indicators and Warning Signs
232 Th is one of the two nuclides beyond bismuth (the other being 238 U) that have half-lives measured in billions of years; its half-life is 14.05 billion years, about three times the age of the Earth, and slightly longer than the age of the universe. Four-fifths of the thorium present at Earth's formation has survived to the present.