Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
No odd-neutron-number isotope is the most naturally abundant isotope in its element, except for beryllium-9 (which is the only stable beryllium isotope), nitrogen-14, and platinum-195. No stable nuclides have a neutron number of 19, 21, 35, 39, 45, 61, 89, 115, 123, or ≥ 127.
An example is calcium-40, with 20 neutrons and 20 protons, which is the heaviest stable isotope made of the same number of protons and neutrons. Both calcium-48 and nickel-48 are doubly magic because calcium-48 has 20 protons and 28 neutrons while nickel-48 has 28 protons and 20 neutrons. Calcium-48 is very neutron-rich for such a relatively ...
For example, uranium-238 usually decays by alpha decay, where the nucleus loses two neutrons and two protons in the form of an alpha particle. Thus the atomic number and the number of neutrons each decrease by 2 ( Z : 92 → 90, N : 146 → 144), so that the mass number decreases by 4 ( A = 238 → 234); the result is an atom of thorium-234 and ...
Neutrons produced in fission, as noted above, have a Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution of kinetic energies from 0 to ~14 MeV, a mean energy of 2 MeV (for 235 U fission neutrons), and a mode of only 0.75 MeV, which means that more than half of them do not qualify as fast (and thus have almost no chance of initiating fission in fertile materials ...
The multiplication factor, k, is defined as (see nuclear chain reaction): k = number of neutrons in one generation / number of neutrons in preceding generation . If k is greater than 1, the chain reaction is supercritical, and the neutron population will grow exponentially.
The stable nucleus has approximately a constant density and therefore the nuclear radius R can be approximated by the following formula, R = r 0 A 1 / 3 {\displaystyle R=r_{0}A^{1/3}\,} where A = Atomic mass number (the number of protons Z , plus the number of neutrons N ) and r 0 = 1.25 fm = 1.25 × 10 −15 m.
Since protons and neutrons have approximately the same mass (and the mass of the electrons is negligible for many purposes) and the mass defect of the nucleon binding is always small compared to the nucleon mass, the atomic mass of any atom, when expressed in daltons (making a quantity called the "relative isotopic mass"), is within 1% of the ...
To calculate the binding energy we use the formula Z (m p + m e) + N m n − m nuclide where Z denotes the number of protons in the nuclides and N their number of neutrons. We take m p = 938.272 0813 (58) MeV/c 2, m e = 0.510 998 9461 (30) MeV/c 2 and m n = 939.565 4133 (58) MeV/c 2.