Half life meaning
But what are t and t 1/2? Well, t is simply the amount of time that has passed since we counted the N initial atoms we began with, and t 1/2 is the half-life for the decay of those atoms. is the time required for its concentration to reach a value that is the arithmetic mean of its. In other words, if we start with a population of atoms-or, as we’ll see in a moment, anything else that decays exponentially-that we’ll call N initial (that’s the initial number of those atoms), and we then multiply it by 1/2 raised to the power t/ t 1/2, then we can calculate the number of atoms we end up with. For a given reaction the half life t1/2 of a. This type of decay-in which an average of half the members of a population disappear in a half-life of time … and then another half disappear in the next half-life … and then half of whatever is remaining disappear in the next half-life … and so on forever-is known as exponential decay. We can represent this type of decay in terms of a fairly simple formula: So if there are 1 billion atoms to start with, there will on average be 500 million atoms left after a time equal to their half-life. In other words, in a big group of the same type of radioactive atoms, there is a certain amount of time-called the half-life-that will pass before more-or-less half of the atoms will have decayed. But even if we don’t know when any one particular atom will decay, we do know the overall average rate at which atoms in the pile will decay. The spontaneous nature of this decay means that it’s impossible to predict exactly when any individual atom in a huge pile of atoms will decay. … it’s impossible to predict exactly when any individual atom in a huge pile of atoms will decay. A bit more precisely, some unstable isotopes of certain atoms (meaning certain versions of certain atoms that have certain, shall we say, non-standard numbers of neutrons in their nuclei) will spontaneously turn into different elements and in so doing release other particles and light along the way.
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The term is commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly. T p is always a constant for a particular radioactive isotope and is unaffected by changes in surrounding such as temperature or pressure. Half-life is the time required for a quantity to reduce to half of its initial value.
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The time interval required for an amount of certain radioactive nuclei to decay to half of its original value. The half-life time is the duration it takes for any physical process to reduce the initial amount to fifty percent of its initial value.