Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The term "half-life" is almost exclusively used for decay processes that are exponential (such as radioactive decay or the other examples above), or approximately exponential (such as biological half-life discussed below). In a decay process that is not even close to exponential, the half-life will change dramatically while the decay is happening.
The biological half-lives "alpha half-life" and "beta half-life" of a substance measure how quickly a substance is distributed and eliminated. Physical optics: The intensity of electromagnetic radiation such as light or X-rays or gamma rays in an absorbent medium, follows an exponential decrease with distance into the absorbing medium.
In principle a half-life, a third-life, or even a (1/√2)-life, could be used in exactly the same way as half-life; but the mean life and half-life t 1/2 have been adopted as standard times associated with exponential decay. Those parameters can be related to the following time-dependent parameters:
Absorption half-life 1 h, elimination half-life 12 h. Biological half-life ( elimination half-life , pharmacological half-life ) is the time taken for concentration of a biological substance (such as a medication ) to decrease from its maximum concentration ( C max ) to half of C max in the blood plasma .
Half-life has units of time, and the elimination rate constant has units of 1/time, e.g., per hour or per day. An equation can be used to forecast the concentration of a compound at any future time when the fractional degration rate and steady state concentration are known:
This is a list of radioactive nuclides (sometimes also called isotopes), ordered by half-life from shortest to longest, in seconds, minutes, hours, days and years. Current methods make it difficult to measure half-lives between approximately 10 −19 and 10 −10 seconds.
The half-life of this isotope is 6.480 days, [2] which corresponds to a total decay constant of 0.1070 d −1. Then the partial decay constants, as computed from the branching fractions, are 0.1050 d −1 for ε/β + decays, and 2.14×10 −4 d −1 for β − decays. Their respective partial half-lives are 6.603 d and 347 d.
Alternatively, since the radioactive decay contributes to the "physical (i.e. radioactive)" half-life, while the metabolic elimination processes determines the "biological" half-life of the radionuclide, the two act as parallel paths for elimination of the radioactivity, the effective half-life could also be represented by the formula: [1] [2]