- #1
erazork
- 1
- 0
- TL;DR Summary
- What is meant by decay constant?
Hello everyone.
First my english is not good, sorry for that. So i am not a physician, i am just somebody who wants to learn things by myself, and therefore i don't have many people to ask from, if i am stuck. So here it goes.
There are many threads about this question already, and i am still failing to understand what decay constant actually means, because the answers dosent make sense to me. Here is a forum, with this question-https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/what-is-meant-by-decay-constant.590778/
Copy paste from it-
Eg if λ= 0.1 and we start with 1000 atoms then after 1 second 100 will have decayed and 900 will be left undecayed.
the decay constant is also a probability of decay...
And similar answers like this appear later on. Here is my problem.
Let λ =1, that would mean that a particle has 100 % chance to decay after 1 second, so it has to decay. So according to the equation
half life has to be ln2, which is 0,693 s. But after two half lifes, approxymately 1,4s, we would still have one quarter of our original atoms undecayed. That dosent correspond with the assumption that the decay constant is 1, because after passing 1 sec, 100% decay chance would mean we don't have any undecay atoms.
Somewhere there is a flaw in my thinking, i just can't find it alone.
First my english is not good, sorry for that. So i am not a physician, i am just somebody who wants to learn things by myself, and therefore i don't have many people to ask from, if i am stuck. So here it goes.
There are many threads about this question already, and i am still failing to understand what decay constant actually means, because the answers dosent make sense to me. Here is a forum, with this question-https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/what-is-meant-by-decay-constant.590778/
Copy paste from it-
Eg if λ= 0.1 and we start with 1000 atoms then after 1 second 100 will have decayed and 900 will be left undecayed.
the decay constant is also a probability of decay...
And similar answers like this appear later on. Here is my problem.
Let λ =1, that would mean that a particle has 100 % chance to decay after 1 second, so it has to decay. So according to the equation
half life has to be ln2, which is 0,693 s. But after two half lifes, approxymately 1,4s, we would still have one quarter of our original atoms undecayed. That dosent correspond with the assumption that the decay constant is 1, because after passing 1 sec, 100% decay chance would mean we don't have any undecay atoms.
Somewhere there is a flaw in my thinking, i just can't find it alone.