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The Feynman diagrams are much easier to keep track of than "old-fashioned" terms, because the old-fashioned way treats the particle and antiparticle contributions as separate. Each Feynman diagram is the sum of exponentially many old-fashioned terms, because each internal line can separately represent either a particle or an antiparticle.
A positive void coefficient means that the reactivity increases as the void content inside the reactor increases due to increased boiling or loss of coolant; for example, if the coolant acts predominantly as neutron absorber. This positive void coefficient causes a positive feedback loop, starting with the first occurrence of steam bubbles ...
The reaction energy (the "Q-value") is positive for exothermal reactions and negative for endothermal reactions, opposite to the similar expression in chemistry. On the one hand, it is the difference between the sums of kinetic energies on the final side and on the initial side.
A reactor consists of an assembly of nuclear fuel (a reactor core), usually surrounded by a neutron moderator such as regular water, heavy water, graphite, or zirconium hydride, and fitted with mechanisms such as control rods which control the rate of the reaction. The physics of nuclear fission has several quirks that affect the design and ...
Proton emitters can be produced via nuclear reactions, usually utilizing linear particle accelerators (linac). Although prompt (i.e. not beta-delayed) proton emission was observed from an isomer in cobalt-53 as early as 1969, no other proton-emitting states were found until 1981, when the proton radioactive ground states of lutetium-151 and ...
A reaction with a negative Q value is endothermic, i.e. requires a net energy input, since the kinetic energy of the final state is less than the kinetic energy of the initial state. [1] Observe that a chemical reaction is exothermic when it has a negative enthalpy of reaction, in contrast a positive Q value in a nuclear reaction.
Figure 6:Reaction Coordinate Diagrams showing reactions with 0, 1 and 2 intermediates: The double-headed arrow shows the first, second and third step in each reaction coordinate diagram. In all three of these reactions the first step is the slow step because the activation energy from the reactants to the transition state is the highest.
A table or chart of nuclides is a two-dimensional graph of isotopes of the elements, in which one axis represents the number of neutrons (symbol N) and the other represents the number of protons (atomic number, symbol Z) in the atomic nucleus. Each point plotted on the graph thus represents a nuclide of a known or hypothetical chemical element.