Physics Lesson 20.4.5 - Nuclear Reaction Occurring Spontaneously. Radioactive Families

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Welcome to our Physics lesson on Nuclear Reaction Occurring Spontaneously. Radioactive Families, this is the fifth lesson of our suite of physics lessons covering the topic of Nuclear Reactions, you can find links to the other lessons within this tutorial and access additional physics learning resources below this lesson.

Nuclear Reaction Occurring Spontaneously. Radioactive Families

In such reactions, heavy nuclei throw spontaneously one or more particles and as a result, they lose the excess of energy by transforming into lighter nuclei. A typical example of this category of nuclear reactions include situations related to radioactive decay. Thus, the natural uranium U-238 converts to actinium Ac-234 by means of an alpha decay, according the scheme:

On the other hand, the actinium (daughter) nucleus is excited as well, so it releases another alpha particle to get rid of this excess of energy according the nuclear reaction

and so on. This process continues until a stable nucleus is obtained. The nuclei that participate in a certain chain of nuclear reaction as the one shown above form a radioactive family.

Example 2

A neutron hits an oxygen O-16 nucleus and as a result, a deuterium H-2 nucleus is obtained. What is the other nucleus produced in this nuclear reaction?

Solution 2

This nuclear reaction occurs according the following scheme:

In this way, we obtain two linear equations:

and

Hence, by solving both of them, we obtain A = 15 and Z = 7. The element having such values corresponds to a nitrogen isotope, (¹⁵₇N ).

You have reached the end of Physics lesson 20.4.5 Nuclear Reaction Occurring Spontaneously. Radioactive Families. There are 11 lessons in this physics tutorial covering Nuclear Reactions, you can access all the lessons from this tutorial below.

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