Question about isotopes?

Question

Isotopes are elements with varying amount of neutrons, right? How do those elements become isotopes? Also, they emit radiation, right? But if neutrons have no charge and just have atomic weight, where is the radiation coming from? From the emission of neutrons?

Answer 1

The binding of protons and neutrons, in the nucleus, through the strong nuclear force requires a balance between the number of neutrons and protons in there.

The reason being, each acts as the "glue" for the other - for example, a nucleus of pure protons or pure neutrons would not be possible because the mutual gluing factor of the other type of particle would not be there.

To give an example of how this works, in some models of nucleon binding, this binding force is mediated by a virtual pi-meson that is exchanged between the neutron and the proton - when this pi-meson is exchanged, the proton and the neutron exchange identities, which means that one is converted into the other.

So we can see that there has to be a relative balance between the two.

However, in certain isotopes, there is something of an imbalance, so that even if the nucleus may stay together, it is not a reliable binding and the nucleus is said to be unstable - so it may radiate a proton or an alpha particle or something like that (I am not sure of the details) to attempt to bring the nucleus to a stable configuration.

Now the particle emission phenomenon in this cases has a statistical property which is constant for a given isotope, so it has a given half life in which half the isotope will be converted to another type in a given time period.

** a virtual particle is one that is materialized out of the quantum mechanical vacuum and then disappears again - it does not have real energy, and is that type which mediates the forces of nature - virtual particles can never be directly observed because they are always masked by the quantum mechanical noise that is the mechanism that creates these particles in the first place - these are of the same type as real particles, except their modality of existence is different.





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Answer 2

(I'm not really good at English.so I'm sorry if u don't understand something;I did my best)in an atom nucleus,each proton and neutron has a specific amount of energy(just like electrons)when an electron gain enough energy and travels to the next orbit,on the way back the electron releases the energy as rays.the same thing happens in atom nucleus.whenever a proton or neutron is not in an appropriate place,it releases energy and get to a stable position.the difference between electrons' movement and the protons' or neutrons' movement is that the protons' or the neutrons' movement releases a lot more energy than electron's movement.that's why nuclei release gamma rays,which is very energetic.

Answer 3

each and every of the mass numbers interior the periodic table are realative atomic hundreds, that effectively capacity the arithimetic recommend, or basic mass of each and every of the atoms of each and every style interior the international. So all atoms are for this reason isotopes. The definition of an isotope is atoms with the comparable proton quantity yet diverse numbers of neutrons. As a commonplace rule if the neutron quantity differs severely from the proton quantity the atom would be risky and rot with the launch of radiation. there are a number of exceptions, for example lithium in team one has a relative mass of 7 and atomic quantity 3 so it has 4 neutrons and is extremely good. Atoms with atomic quantity over 80 3 Bismuth are all risky as there neutron numbers are severely greater than the proton quantity. wish this facilitates.

Answer 4

maybe you're thinking in slightly the wrong way - all elements have at least one isotope. there are two types, stable and radioactive isotopes. radioactive isotopes are the ones that emit radiation, but there are several 'decay modes', neutron emission is one mode but the main ones are alpha, beta and gamma decay:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay

other than decay, isotopes are formed by nuclear fusion (joining two atomic nuclei, usually in stars) and nuclear fission (splitting two nuclei, different to decay because it doesn't happen spontaneously). either of these processes can form radioactive isotopes.

these are all nuclear reactions - rather than rearranging electrons (and small amounts of energy) they are rearranging atomic nuclei (and large amounts of energy).