Examples of nuclide in the following topics:
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- After one half-life has elapsed, one half of the atoms of the nuclide in question will have decayed into a "daughter" nuclide, or decay product.
- In many cases, the daughter nuclide is radioactive, resulting in a decay chain.
- This chain eventually ends with the formation of a stable, nonradioactive daughter nuclide.
- Therefore, in any material containing a radioactive nuclide, the proportion of the original nuclide to its decay products changes in a predictable way as the original nuclide decays over time.
- Each parent nuclide spontaneously decays into a daughter nuclide (the decay product) via an α decay or a β decay.
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- Filled shells, such as the filled shell of 50 protons in the element tin, confers unusual stability on the nuclide.
- Of the 254 known stable nuclides, only four have both an odd number of protons and an odd number of neutrons:
- Also, only four naturally occurring, radioactive odd-odd nuclides have a half-life greater than a billion years:
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- Therefore the set of all nuclides with the same A can be introduced; these isobaric nuclides may turn into each other via beta decay.
- One example is the odd-proton odd-neutron nuclide 40 K, which undergoes both types of beta decay with a half-life of 1.277 ·109 years.
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- After one half-life has elapsed, one half of the atoms of the Lead-212 nuclide will have decayed into a "daughter" nuclide or decay product.
- In many cases, the daughter nuclide itself is radioactive, resulting in a decay chain, eventually ending with the formation of a stable (nonradioactive) daughter nuclide in this case Lead-208; each step in such a chain is characterized by a distinct half-life.
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- For a large number of atoms, the decay rate for the collection as a whole can be computed from the measured decay constants of the nuclides, or, equivalently, from the half-lives.
- Half-lives vary widely; the half-life of 209Bi is 1019 years, while unstable nuclides can have half-lives that have been measured as short as 10−23 seconds.
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- Alpha decay typically occurs in the heaviest nuclides.
- In theory it can occur only in nuclei somewhat heavier than nickel (element 28), in which overall binding energy per nucleon is no longer a minimum and the nuclides are therefore unstable toward spontaneous fission-type processes.
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- The law of radioactive decay describes the statistical behavior of a large number of nuclides, rather than individual ones.
- In the following relation, the number of nuclides or nuclide population, N, is of course a natural number.
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- But, since its activity is inversely proportional to its half-life, any nuclide in the decay chain finally contributes as much as the head of the chain.
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- The time it takes for a substance (drug, radioactive nuclide, or other)
to lose half of its pharmacological, physiological, biological, or
radiological activity is called its half-life.
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- Half-lives of known radionuclides vary widely, from more than 1019 years, such as for the very nearly stable nuclide 209 Bi, to 10−23 seconds for highly unstable ones.