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Radioactive decay (also known as nuclear decay, radioactivity, radioactive disintegration, or nuclear disintegration) is the process by which an unstable atomic nucleus loses energy by radiation. A material containing unstable nuclei is considered radioactive. Three of the most common types of decay are alpha, beta, and gamma decay.
Radioactivity is generally used in life sciences for highly sensitive and direct measurements of biological phenomena, and for visualizing the location of biomolecules radiolabelled with a radioisotope . All atoms exist as stable or unstable isotopes and the latter decay at a given half-life ranging from attoseconds to billions of years ...
Half-life (symbol t½) is the time required for a quantity (of substance) to reduce to half of its initial value. The term is commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo radioactive decay or how long stable atoms survive. The term is also used more generally to characterize any type of exponential (or, rarely ...
Radiobiology. Radiobiology (also known as radiation biology, and uncommonly as actinobiology) is a field of clinical and basic medical sciences that involves the study of the effects of ionizing radiation on living things, in particular health effects of radiation. Ionizing radiation is generally harmful and potentially lethal to living things ...
Radiometric dating, radioactive dating or radioisotope dating is a technique which is used to date materials such as rocks or carbon, in which trace radioactive impurities were selectively incorporated when they were formed. The method compares the abundance of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope within the material to the abundance of ...
Effective half-life. In pharmacokinetics, the effective half-life is the rate of accumulation or elimination of a biochemical or pharmacological substance in an organism; it is the analogue of biological half-life when the kinetics are governed by multiple independent mechanisms. This is seen when there are multiple mechanisms of elimination ...
A radioactive tracer, radiotracer, or radioactive label is a synthetic derivative of a natural compound in which one or more atoms have been replaced by a radionuclide (a radioactive atom). By virtue of its radioactive decay , it can be used to explore the mechanism of chemical reactions by tracing the path that the radioisotope follows from ...
Specific activity. In the context of radioactivity, activity or total activity (symbol A) is a physical quantity defined as the number of radioactive transformations per second that occur in a particular radionuclide. [1] The unit of activity is the becquerel (symbol Bq), which is defined equivalent to reciprocal seconds (symbol s -1 ).