Radioactive Disintegration (Introduction to Radiochemistry)

Radioactive disintegration is a stochastic proces, which means a random process, that can be described statistically. In this task you will learn about the secular radioactive equilibrium, and how any measure of a radioactive source is stated with uncertainty.

In a sample with N radioactive atoms of a particular nuclide, the number of atoms that disintegrates with the time dt will be proportional with N, see the formula below.

[math]-\frac{dN}{dt} = \lambda N \rightarrow \lambda N = A[/math],

where λ is the disintegration constant and A is the rate of disintegration.

The above equation can be solved into the following:

[math]N_{t} = N_{0} e^{-\lambda t}[/math]

N₀ is the number of atoms of the nuclide at hand present at t = 0. The time past when half of the nuclides has disintegrated is called the half-life. [math]N = \frac{N_{0}}{2}[/math] can be placed into equation 1.1 to give the following connection between the disintegration constant and the half-life:

[math]\lambda = \frac{ln2}{T_{1/2}}[/math]

The half-life is a characteristic value for each radioactive nuclide. A radioactive nuclide will often disintegrate into a product that