Re: Split Atoms

Posted by Uncle Al on Nov 03, 2002 at 12:32
(68.5.243.16)

Re: Split Atoms (William)

The atomic nucleus is protons and neutrons. Coulombic repulsion seeks to rip it apart, the Strong Force holds it together. Coulombic forces are mediated by massless photons as virtual vector bosons and so have infinite range. The Strong Force is mediated by heavily massed gluons as vector bosons, and so has a very short range - barely a nuclear diameter for the heaviest transuranic elements.

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/FundamentalForces.html

If you separate pieces of the nucleus beyond the range of the Strong Force, the now uncompensated like charges further separate the pieces - at a good fraction of lightspeed! In a very heavy and destablized nucleus like uranium-235 or plutonium-239, adding a neutron sets up oscillations as with a thumped water droplet. A barbell-shaped mode is outside the Strong Force's range at its ends, and the nucleus cleaves.

U-235 fissions with any neutron. U-238 requires a 1 MeV neutron or better, hence its use as a jacket for H-bombs which have a plethora of excess hot neutrons from deuterium and tritium fusion.

Of course, you can do a pool break if you pop in any sufficiently energetic particle - atomic spallation by cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere. The loosed neutrons thereform react with nitrogen, N-14(n,p)C-14, giving the basis of carbon dating. H-bomb testing in the 1950s and 1960s raised the C-14 background from a natural 3 to a man-made 14 disintigrations/g-sec carbon.

--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/eotvos.htm
(Do something naughty to physics)

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