The first step toward building anything more complicated out of the basic building blocks of atoms is to create a nucleus with two nucleons (like a proton and neutron) bound together. This part is easy! The Universe makes deuterium nuclei, abundantly, with no problem. Proton-neutron collisions...
Free neutrons(outside a nucleus) are unstable and decay via beta decay. The decay of the neutron involves the weak interaction and is associated with a quark transformation (a down quark is converted to an up quark). The mean lifetime of a free neutron is 882 seconds (i.e., the...
Stable atoms of iron, such as the isotope iron-56, have 26 protons and 30 neutrons. The excess of neutrons granted to iron by neutron capture makes the iron atoms unstable and radioactive due to a huge imbalance between protons and neutrons. This results in some of the atoms undergoing ...
It too is a bound state, but what it binds is not something as simple as a proton and an electron, as in hydrogen, or even a few dozen electrons to an atomic nucleus, as in more complicated atoms such as gold, but zillions (meaning “too many and too changeable to count usefully”...
Isotopes are a subcategory of elements that organizes the atoms of an element by how many neutrons are in its nucleus. The isotopes of an element can come in either one of two forms: stable or unstable. Unstable isotopes, a.k.a. radioactive isotopes, emit particles from them in a ...
For example, sodium and chlorine, two highly poisonous elements that are unstable at room temperatures, combine to form one of the most common and harmless compounds known to man calledcommon salt(sodium chloride, or NaCl). Unlike its constituent elements, salt is highly stable, harmless to huma...
What is a free radical? Atom: The smallest part of a living or non-living thing consists of a central nucleus surrounded by one or more electrons is called an atom. The number of protons present in the nucleus of an atom is designated as an atomic number of an element and it is ...
Nuclear chemistry is the part of chemistry that does research on the activity in the nucleus of an atom and radioactive isotopes. Radioactive isotopes emit radiation to become more stable. Answer and Explanation:1 The belt of stability in nuclear chemistry is the narrow region, on a graph of...
Aside:While the noble gases are generally stable by themselves, there are situations where they can bond with atoms. An excited noble gas atom can form bonds in a process called dimerization. Dimerization makes it possible for a noble gas atom to link up with other atoms nearby or to make ...
This mechanism involves the formation of a small nucleus of structure stabilised by weak, possibly long-range, contacts and the subsequent rapid collapse around this folding nucleus to yield the native state [10], [12], [15]. A combination of simulation and experimental data on members of the...