Band of Stability: Beta Decay - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems
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concept
Band of Stability: Beta Decay
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Hey, everyone in this video, we're gonna take a look at beta decay here. We're going to say that beta decay happens for isotopes to the left of the band of stability. Here, we have a band of stability, which is this green curve and this blue area represents where isotopes that exist that will perform beta decay. Now, we're going to say here a good example is palladium 107. Here it emits a beta particle in order to become silver 107. Now, here we're going to say that those in the blue region, these are isotopes that have an excess of neutrons beta decay helps them to convert their neutrons or excess neutrons into protons. If we look, take a look here, we have neutrons over here. So what tends to happen is we're gonna drop down a little bit in terms of the number of neutrons and we're gonna shift to the right increasing our number of protons. This allows us to fall within the band of stability and become a more stable isotope. So just remember to the left of the curve, we have beta decay, the whole purpose is to help reduce our number of neutrons increase our number of protons that we fall within the band of stability.
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example
Band of Stability: Beta Decay Example
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Here, it says to provide the identity of the dog or N glide created from the beta decay of magnesium 28. So here we're dealing with magnesium, it's mass numbers 28. And if we look on the periodic table, its atomic number is 12, it's undergoing beta decay. So it's going to emit an electron and we just need to make sure that our mass numbers are the same on both sides and our number of protons are the same on both sides. Here, we have 28 on the left side. So we need a total of 28 for our mass number. On the product side, the electron contributes nothing to the mass number. So our new isotope has to have 28. Here on the left side, we have 12 protons on the right side, we still need to have 12 protons. But here we have a minus one. So the number here would have to be 13 because 13 minus one is 12 looking on the periodic table, the only element that has an atomic number 13 is aluminum. So the beta decay of magnesium 28 produces aluminum 28. Meaning that option D is our final answer.
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Problem
Problem
How many beta decays would it take to transform tungsten-184 into iridium-184?
a) 5
b) 1
c) 3
d) 4
A
5
B
1
C
3
D
4
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