why do neutrons escape?

Question

don't neutrons act as glue to bond the prontons together since all the protons repel? so if the whole nucleus is tightly bonded, why do neutrons escape as radiation? and when they escape what kind of radiation do they escape as? gamma?

Answer 1

no... protons are held in place by the negatively charged electrons.
its called neutron radiation or ionizing radiation. This type of radiation is one of the worse because it can pass through matter better than other types and only stops after a headon collision with a nucleus

Discovery

In 1930 Walther Bothe and H. Becker in Germany found that if the very energetic alpha particles emitted from polonium fell on certain of the light elements, specifically beryllium, boron, or lithium, an unusually penetrating radiation was produced. At first this radiation was thought to be gamma radiation although it was more penetrating than any gamma rays known, and the details of experimental results were very difficult to interpret on this basis. The next important contribution was reported in 1932 by Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot in Paris. They showed that if this unknown radiation fell on paraffin or any other hydrogen-containing compound it ejected protons of very high energy. This was not in itself inconsistent with the assumed gamma ray nature of the new radiation, but detailed quantitative analysis of the data became increasingly difficult to reconcile with such a hypothesis. Finally (later in 1932) the physicist James Chadwick in England performed a series of experiments showing that the gamma ray hypothesis was untenable. He suggested that in fact the new radiation consisted of uncharged particles of approximately the mass of the proton, and he performed a series of experiments verifying his suggestion. Such uncharged particles were eventually called neutrons, apparently from the Latin root for neutral and the Greek ending -on (by imitation of electron and proton).

Answer 2

I HAVE ELABORATED MY ANSWER. IT IS NOT THAT EASY TO EXPLAIN IN SIMPLE TERMS, BUT I HOPE THE FOLLOWING HELPS:

Atomic nuclei consist of protons and neutrons (not any electrons) and are hold together by the strong interaction which acts both between protons and protons, neutrons and neutrons and protons and neutrons. But you are right that there is a repulsive electric force between the protons and the neutrons help to separate the protons such that they on average can be sufficiently far from each other that the attractive strong interaction can overwhelm the repulsive electric force.

However, too many neutrons in a nuclei is also bad. It lies in the nature of the strong interaction that it works best when there is about equal numbers of protons and neutrons (it is not at all obvious why and requires quantum mechanical considerations to understand why, so I think you have to take that as a basic fact). Therefore if a nucleus has a catastrophically high number of neutrons, the strong interaction might not be able to hold the nucleus together and one or more of the neutrons might be "spilled" out. The strong interaction is VERY short ranged - the particles have to literally touch each other to feel it so that means that once the neutron has escaped nothing will bind it to the nucleus again and it will be emitted as radiation. For the same reasons nuclei consisting only of neutrons and no protons don't exist. It is kinda funny: Even if the protons repel each other when they are separated they are just as necessaray as the neutrons in holding a nucleus together!

Neutron radiation is neutron radiation - there is no special word for it (it has nothing to do with gamma radiation which consists of of high energy photons - you can call it x-rays with high energy). Neutron radiation with low energy ("slow" neutrons) is very dangerous, cause the neutrons can pentrate our body and when the neutrons finally hit a nucleus they will "stick" and the nuclei might turn into radioactive isotopes somewhere inside our body.

Free neutrons don't easily interact with matter because of their lack of charge which means that they don't interact with the electrons cloud in atoms. You are completely right that the neutron interact strongly with atomic nuclei, but the thing is that the electron cloud around the nucleus fills out about 100,000 times more space than the nuclei meaning that the probabililty that a neutron hits the nucleus is quite small.

Good question. I hope my answer is useful...

Answer 3

Neutrons do not "glue" the nucleus together. What holds the nucleus together is the strong nuclear force. This force is much greater than the electromagnetic force that causes the like-charged protons to repel each other, but operates over a much smaller distance. So, in order to have the strong force be the dominant force, the particles must be very close together.

At least that's the way I understand it.

There is a type of radioactive decay in which protons and neutrons are expelled from the nucleus of an atom. This is known as alpha decay. What is emitted is an alpha particle and it has the same configuration as a doubly ionized helium atom. In other words, it is two protons and two neutrons.

Answer 4

protons and neutrons are held together in the nucleus by "Strong Force".

It is not true that only neutrons escape as radiation. During a radioactive decay various rays such as Alpha rays, Beta Rays and Gamma rays are emitted.

It is quite difficult to explain all the stuff relating to nuclear disintegration here. Just do a search on these topics and you would get a lot of interesting stuff. A few web pages found by me are listed.

Answer 5

Neutrons do not act as glue to bind protons together. For example, hydrogen has three isotopes all with a single proton in the nucleus and either none, one or two neutrons. If anything, the single proton is somehow binding one or two neutrons!

The answer to your question really involves the theory of Quantum Chroma Dynamics (QCD), which is very weird stuff. And complicated mathematically to boot. But the following is a layman's description of what is going on "inside the nucleus" of an atom that emits neutrons.

The atomic nucleus consists only of protons and neutrons but these are not truly "elementary" particles. They are simply the smallest particles that have mass and occupy a specific volume of space. QCD theory says these real particles, which we can observe and manipulate, are made of quarks... which cannot be observed or manipulated.

Quarks have mass but are "point like" objects with fractional charges measured in thirds of the basic unit-charge of an electron (unit negative charge) or proton (unit positive charge). The quarks bind together by exchanging virtual particles called gluons, which represent the "strong" nuclear force, much as the electrostatic charge of protons and electrons is mediated by the exchange of virtual photons.

Three quarks that bind together as a proton have their charges add up to +1 and three other quarks that bind as neutrons have their charges add up to zero. There are many other possible arrangements of two or three quarks, but none is stable and none appear in the nucleus of atoms in a manner that can be observed. The gluon "field" that binds all the quarks together also binds the protons and neutrons made from those quarks. This field represents the "strong force" that holds together the protons and neutrons in the nucleus.

Not all atomic nuclei consist of "tightly bonded" protons and neutrons. All nuclei are either stable or radioactive. If radioactive, the nucleus eventually decays by one or more of four natural mechanisms: it emits (1) a photon (gamma ray); (2) an electron (beta particle); (3) a helium nucleus (alpha particle) consisting of two protons and two neutrons bound together; or (4) it spontaneously fissions into two lighter nuclei with possibly one or more free and highly energetic neutrons left over to fly off in random directions.

It is mechanism (4) that causes neutrons to "escape as radiation" from the nucleus. Neutron radiation is just kinetic energy, the energy associated with the mass of the neutron in motion: one-half the mass times its velocity squared.

Why does spontaneous fission occur? As an atomic nucleus gets larger, it begins to behave sort of like a water balloon. The protons and neutrons can "slosh around" inside, distorting the roughly spherical shape into a football shape. This random "sloshing" can sometimes stretch the nucleus enough to break the bond of the strong force between the two ends of the "football" causing the nucleus to break into two lighter nuclei, sometimes with a neutron or two or three left over, and the emission of a gamma ray. This doesn't occur very often in nature or there wouldn't be any of those elements left to observe!

It is not predictable exactly how the nucleus will divide when it fissions and what the new elements will be, although there will be a definite range of elements produced. The number of neutrons released is also a function of how the nucleus divides. For U-235, for example, about 2.5 neutrons (on average) are released per fission.

If these high speed neutrons that are the result of spontaneous fission can be slowed down or moderated, they can be captured by a nearby U-235 nucleus, which then becomes more unstable, fissions quickly, and releases more neutrons. If none of these neutrons escaped and all were absorbed by nearby U-235 nuclei the number of fissioning nuclei would more than double with each generation.

From such physics we get nuclear power reactors, atomic bombs, and very useful man-made radioactive isotopes.

Answer 6

No they don't glue but they do "dilute" the charge from the protons.The strong force holds the nucleus together and its about 100 times stronger than the electro-magnetic force (which is forcing the protons apart) and its no coincidence that atoms with roughly 100 nucleons in the nucleus are unstable and prone to decay - because the strong force is finding it difficult to "keep a grip" on so many particles and occassionally one escapes.

Answer 7

They do???????????????