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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 ...
Exponential decay. A quantity undergoing exponential decay. Larger decay constants make the quantity vanish much more rapidly. This plot shows decay for decay constant ( λ) of 25, 5, 1, 1/5, and 1/25 for x from 0 to 5. A quantity is subject to exponential decay if it decreases at a rate proportional to its current value.
In principle a half-life, a third-life, or even a (1/√2)-life, can be used in exactly the same way as half-life; but the mean life and half-life t 1/2 have been adopted as standard times associated with exponential decay. Those parameters can be related to the following time-dependent parameters:
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 ).
Particle decay. In particle physics, particle decay is the spontaneous process of one unstable subatomic particle transforming into multiple other particles. The particles created in this process (the final state) must each be less massive than the original, although the total mass of the system must be conserved.
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 ...
Biological half-life (elimination half-life, pharmacological half-life) is the time taken for concentration of a biological substance (such as a medication) to decrease from its maximum concentration (C max) to half of C max in the blood plasma.
This is still a short half-life relative to many other known modes of radioactive decay and it is in the middle of the range of half lives for radiopharmaceuticals used for medical imaging. After gamma emission or internal conversion, the resulting ground-state technetium-99 then decays with a half-life of 211,000 years to stable ruthenium-99 ...