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Beryllium-8 (8 Be, Be-8) is a radionuclide with 4 neutrons and 4 protons. It is an unbound resonance and nominally an isotope of beryllium . It decays into two alpha particles with a half-life on the order of 8.19 × 10 −17 seconds.
It was discovered in the 1930s that alpha radiation that strikes the beryllium nucleus would release neutrons. The high speed of the alpha is sufficient to overcome the relatively low Coulomb barrier of the beryllium nucleus, the repulsive force due to the positive charge of the nucleus, which contains only four protons, allowing for fusion of ...
toward alpha decay, which is favored due to the extremely tight binding of 4 He nuclei. The half-life for the decay of 8 Be is only 81.9(3.7) attoseconds. Beryllium is prevented from having a stable isotope with 4 protons and 6 neutrons by the very lopsided neutron–proton ratio for such a light element. Nevertheless, this isotope, 10 Be
Neutron radiation was discovered from observing an alpha particle colliding with a beryllium nucleus, which was transformed into a carbon nucleus while emitting a neutron, Be(α, n)C. The combination of an alpha particle emitter and an isotope with a large (α, n) nuclear reaction probability is still a common neutron source.
Some isotopes undergo spontaneous fission (SF) with emission of neutrons.The most common spontaneous fission source is the isotope californium-252. 252 Cf and all other SF neutron sources are made by irradiating uranium or a transuranic element in a nuclear reactor, where neutrons are absorbed in the starting material and its subsequent reaction products, transmuting the starting material into ...
The corresponding mass formula is defined purely in terms of the numbers of protons and neutrons it contains. The original Weizsäcker formula defines five terms: Volume energy, when an assembly of nucleons of the same size is packed together into the smallest volume, each interior nucleon has a certain number of other nucleons in contact with ...
Two examples of isotopes that emit neutrons are beryllium-13 (decaying to beryllium-12 with a mean life 2.7 × 10 −21 s) and helium-5 (helium-4, 7 × 10 −22 s). [ 1 ] In tables of nuclear decay modes, neutron emission is commonly denoted by the abbreviation n .
Hydrodynamic forces acting on the grooved shell thoroughly and virtually instantly mix the beryllium and polonium, allowing the alpha particles from the polonium to impinge on the beryllium atoms. Reacting to alpha particle bombardment, the beryllium atoms emit neutrons at a rate of about 1 neutron every 5–10 nanoseconds (See Beryllium).