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Half-life of radioactivity

Name: Keenan Yap Zhi Hong


Group: 2-3
Introduction
 Radioactive half-life
• Average time taken for a given mass of radioactive atoms to reduce to half the
original number through radioactive decay
• Is a way to characterise the rate of radioactive decay of a nuclide (a distinct
kind of atom or nucleus characterized by a specific number of protons and
neutrons)
• Discovered by Ernest Rutherford in 1907
• Was originally known as half-life period
• Each element and their respective isotopes have their own half-life
• The table below shows the half-life of isotopes from some sample elements:

Isotope Half-life
Polonium-215 0.0018 seconds
Bismuth-212 60.5 seconds
Sodium-24 15 hours
Iodine-131 8.07 days
Cobalt-60 5.26 years
Radium-226 1600 years
Uranium-238 4.5 billion years
• For most radioactive nuclides, the half-life depends solely on nuclear properties
and is essentially a constant
 Not affected by many external factors such as:
 Temperature

 Pressure

 Chemical environment

 Presence of magnetic or electric field

• Half lives of radioactive nuclides have no known lower or upper limit


 from nearly instantaneous to far longer than the age of the universe
How it works
 The half life of any nuclide is determined by its rate of radioactive decay
 Radioactive decay is the process by which the nucleus of an unstable atom loses
energy by emitting radiation such as:
 Alpha particles, a
 Beta particles, b
 Gamma rays, γ

 Any material which can undergo radioactive


decay is considered radioactive
 Radioactive decay is a random process
• Impossible to predict when a particular atom will decay

 The chance that a given atom will decay never changes


• it does not matter how long the atom has existed
 However, the decay rate for a large collection of nuclides can be described by
its half-life
 After one half-life has elapsed, one half of the atoms of the nuclide will have
decayed into a "daughter" nuclide

Red dots represent parent nuclides,


while blue dots represent daughter
nuclides.
 Often times, the daughter nuclide is unstable and will decay until it forms a stable
nuclide
 This is called a decay chain
 Each step in the chain has its own half-life

radioactive decay chain from


lead-212 to lead-208
Application of radioactive half life
 Carbon dating
 Carbon-14 is used to determine the age of organic matter
 The ratio of normal carbon (carbon-12) to carbon-14 in the air and in all living
things at any given time is nearly constant.
 Carbon-12 is stable but carbon-14 decays with a half-life of about 5730 years
 After an organism dies it stops taking in new carbon
 By comparing the amount of carbon-14 in living organisms with the sample, the
age of the organic matter can be estimated
 Dating rocks
 Uranium-238 an be used to estimate the age of rocks
 The half-life of uranium-238 is 4500 million years
 After going through a decay chain, stable lead-206 is formed
 The amount of uranium-238 left can be used to estimate the age of the rock
sample
 If half the uranium- 238 has decayed into lead-206, the age of the rock is 4500
million years old
References

Wikipedia, Half-life, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life


NDT Resource Centre, Radioactive half-life, https://www.nde-
ed.org/EducationResources/HighSchool/Radiography/halflife1.htm
Wikipedia, Radioactive decay,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay
Wikipedia, Radiometric dating,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating#Radioactive_decay
BBC.co.uk, Uses of half-life,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/science/add_edexcel/radioactiv
e_materials/radioactiveusesrev4.shtml

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