How many times larger is the atomic volume than the nuclear volume?
What is meant by the size of a particle?
What is a scattering experiment?
What is the approximate radius of a Uranium-238 nucleus?
By what factor does the nuclear radius increase with a doubling of the mass number?
Calculate the binding energy of Carbon-12. Find B/A as well.
What does B/A indicate about a nucleus?
Which is the larger mass: The nucleus or the sum of the masses of the nucleons that comprise it?
What is the half life for a radioactive substance with a decay constant of 1.3x10-4s-1?
How long will it take the material in the previous problem to decrease in activity by 1000x?
What were the basic circumstances that led to the two disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima?
What happens to the ratio N/Z in larger nuclei?
Find the energy released (the loss in rest mass) in the alpha decay of U-238.
Carbon-14 (used in carbon dating) decays into nitrogen-14 via beta decay. Calculate the energy released.
Carbon-14 is used for dating carbon-based life forms. You and I contain the same relative abundance of C-14 as our environment does. However, after death the C-14 in us decays and its abundance drops. The lower the ratio of C-14 to C-12, the longer we've been dead. AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectrometers) can detect 1 part in 1015 so that if there is a single C-14 mixed with a quadrillion C-12 atoms, it will be detected. The natural abundance of C-14 is 1 ppt (part per trillion). What is the oldest sample for which we should expect C-14 dating to work? The half-life of the C-14 decay is 5730 yr.
An iron-57 atom in vacuum undergoes gamma decay. The excited nuclear state is 14.4 keV above the ground state. Find the energy of the emitted photon if
you first ignore the recoil of the atom
you consider the recoil of the atom by using momentum conservation in the rest frame of the emitting nucleus. You may use the classical kinetic energy of the atom. Also recall that for the gamma ray photon (and all photons) E=pc. Since the difference is tiny, please indicate how much less this energy is than in the recoil-free first case.
