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Nuclear fission is a reaction in which the nucleus of an atom splits into two or more smaller nuclei. The fission process often produces gamma photons, and releases a very large amount of energy even by the energetic standards of radioactive decay.
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 24 February 2025. Law of physics and chemistry This article is about the law of conservation of energy in physics. For sustainable energy resources, see Energy conservation. Part of a series on Continuum mechanics J = − D d φ d x {\displaystyle J=-D{\frac {d\varphi }{dx}}} Fick's laws of diffusion ...
The energy released in a nuclear reaction can appear mainly in one of three ways: kinetic energy of the product particles (fraction of the kinetic energy of the charged nuclear reaction products can be directly converted into electrostatic energy); [5] emission of very high energy photons, called gamma rays;
The first law of thermodynamics is a formulation of the law of conservation of energy in the context of thermodynamic processes.The law distinguishes two principal forms of energy transfer, heat and thermodynamic work, that modify a thermodynamic system containing a constant amount of matter.
The fact that energy can be neither created nor destroyed is called the law of conservation of energy. In the form of the first law of thermodynamics, this states that a closed system's energy is constant unless energy is transferred in or out as work or heat, and that no energy is lost in transfer. The total inflow of energy into a system must ...
Since the creation of heavier nuclei by fusion requires energy, nature resorts to the process of neutron capture. Neutrons (due to their lack of charge) are readily absorbed by a nucleus. The heavy elements are created by either a slow neutron capture process (the so-called s-process) or the rapid, or r-process.
The sum of the atomic mass of the two atoms produced by the fission of one fissile atom is always less than the atomic mass of the original atom. This is because some of the mass is lost as free neutrons, and once kinetic energy of the fission products has been removed (i.e., the products have been cooled to extract the heat provided by the reaction), then the mass associated with this energy ...
As energy must be conserved, for pair production to occur, the incoming energy of the photon must be above a threshold of at least the total rest mass energy of the two particles created. (As the electron is the lightest, hence, lowest mass/energy, elementary particle, it requires the least energetic photons of all possible pair-production ...