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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.
There is a half-life describing any exponential-decay process. For example: As noted above, in radioactive decay the half-life is the length of time after which there is a 50% chance that an atom will have undergone nuclear decay. It varies depending on the atom type and isotope, and is usually determined experimentally. See List of nuclides.
Bismuth-209 (209 Bi) is an isotope of bismuth, with the longest known half-life of any radioisotope that undergoes α-decay (alpha decay).It has 83 protons and a magic number [2] of 126 neutrons, [2] and an atomic mass of 208.9803987 amu (atomic mass units).
Radioactive decay is seen in all isotopes of all elements of atomic number 83 or greater. Bismuth-209, however, is only very slightly radioactive, with a half-life greater than the age of the universe; radioisotopes with extremely long half-lives are considered effectively stable for practical purposes.
Half-life T 1/2 is defined as the length of time for half of a given quantity of radioactive atoms to undergo radioactive decay: = /. Taking the natural logarithm of both sides, the half-life is given by / = .
For example, the isotope copper-64, commonly used in medical research, has a half-life of 12.7 hours. If you inject a large group of animals at "time zero", but measure the radioactivity in their organs at two later times, the later groups must be "decay corrected" to adjust for the decay that has occurred between the two time points.
The longest-lived radioisotopes are 205 Pb with a half-life of 17.3 million years and 202 Pb with a half-life of 52,500 years. A shorter-lived naturally occurring radioisotope, 210 Pb with a half-life of 22.2 years, is useful for studying the sedimentation chronology of environmental samples on time scales shorter than 100 years. [5]
However, if the probability of escape at each collision is very small, the half-life of the radioisotope will be very long, since it is the time required for the total probability of escape to reach 50%. As an extreme example, the half-life of the isotope bismuth-209 is 2.01 × 10 19 years.