Island of stability for dummies!

Hi,
island of stability is an area surrounded by lot of really fast decaying elements. Today I will write about island of stability which is on the other hand area with hypotheticly and relatively stable elements.

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By area I do not mean some place. It is rather area in periodic table of elements extended for various isotopes.

The more heavy nucleus of atom gets, the easier and better for him it is to decay, potentially killing everything around, or at least giving some nice brain tumors. But then at some point, some of the elements are smart enough to stay stable, like a boss. Those are the elements in island of stability, this island is not very big and we can just guess its highest peaks.

The elements are much more stable because of the shape of their nucleus. The problem is that the nucleus becomes a bit deformed, even elliptical.

Anyway there is this thing called “magic number” which is a number of protons or neutrons which can lead to good shape which is stable, this means round normally. Such numbers are for example 2,8,20,28… 126. There are few other hypothetical (196,236…), elements which live on this island should have some combination of these numbers which would make them much much more stable than the stuff around.

For example Ununoctium which is the last known element has half-life of only 890 microseconds.

The island should come in proton number of roughly 120 and little bit more.

Picture showing the island of stability (white circle). The most stable elements could last for longer than an year.

There is even hypothetical second island. It would have to be around element 164. Who knows how many more theoretical elements there are before we will simply not be able to stick all these protons and neutrons together (not that we are sticking them).

Dragallur

 

 

1) Particles: Prologue

Hi guys!
I am back with probably short post because I am lazy and tired these days. I know I wanted to start something about triangles but right now I am not that excited for it so I will make some posts about particles. I talked about some before but I have never explained what the hell are quarks for example.

So first of all… particles. Well we think about them like small stuff that is everywhere and everything is made up of it. That is right.
So I will start with molecules, easy peasy those are just two or more atoms made up together.
Atoms are (small), there is some stuff in them but first of all there are “kinds” of atoms, substances and that is Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen, Carbon. They are made up all from the same things but with different amounts. Atoms are made up of core and shell. Usually, you wont do anything with core. It is very stable and not interacting. In our organism there are only changes in molecules. That means that some atoms will move somewhere else and that will change molecules properties.
Shell is made up of electrons. Electrons are NOT made up of something else, it is just primal stuff. Electron belongs to group of particles that are called elementary particles. It´s sub-group is called fermions and its sub-sub-group is leptons which are really small and light.
Core is made up of neutrons and protons. As I talked about them in four fundamental forces series those are particles (sub-atomic) that are hold together by strong force. Anyway protons are positive and neutrons neutral.
There is huge experiment going on in Japanese which is trying to proof that protons are decaying. Its problem is that one proton has half time about 10^31 years long. They did nice trick so they do not need to wait so long by monitoring ultra clear water. There are thousands tons of water and their machines are able to detect any proton decaying to photons.
Photons are also elemental particles but their sub-group is special for particles that are carriers for fundamental force: photon, gluon, bosons but not graviton because he is only hypothetical. Photons are massless which is why they can travel at the speed of light.
At last for review there are quarks which are elemental particles, even fermions like electrons but they are in special group for quarks.
I actually read something about quarks not being elemental (only hypothetical). It was said that if they are not elemental we can not be sure that there is unlimited number of smaller and smaller particles.

This was just a short preview of what I will write about next time.
Dragallur

5) Four fundamental forces: Strong interaction

Hi there!
I am back again! I was very sick with great temperatures but now I am alright with idea what to write about so I am bringing probably the last post for four fundamental forces today with strong interaction as the strongest of all forces.

Again on the left I have here proton. There are two parts of strong interaction, first is color force which is the stronger one and it holds particles, like hadrons (particles made of quarks) together. You probably heard of colors of quarks, there is green red and blue (RGB) and in such particle like proton or neutron those colors always have to add up to white color. If it would be antiparticle it would have anti red, anti green and anti blue.

Again on left you can see how these colors add up to white. Well what happens is that there is gluon, particle which is carrier for strong interaction and it jumps from quark to quark and when it touches it changes its color. There is great animation in this video, I recommend to watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNDOSMqGLlg
This color force is extremely strong so it does not let quarks to go apart. It is even that strong that when you break it new quark will be created from that huge amount of energy! Scientist think that right after big bang when particles were really fast and close to each other there was state of matter called quark-gluon plasma which was kind of soup of quarks and gluons. It is hypothetic and it was not yet created in LHC or somewhere else.

There is that second part of strong interaction called: nuclear force. I am not really sure about it, but anyway you maybe wondered why does nucleas exists when protons(+) should repell each other and that is made by particles called pions which are carrying quarks around and they are creating reaction which is attractive.

On the end, pions are particles made up of two quarks but one of them has to be antiquark so they looks like this:
There are three types of pions and those are Pi+, Pi-, Pi 0. Their life time is incredibly short and they are decaying to neutrinos or gamma rays.

That will be all,
Dragallur
PS: Thanks for your likes and comments

4) Four fundamental forces: Weak interaction

Hi guys!
We are nearly finishing posts for fundamental forces. First I would like to apologize that I forgot to mention that force carrier for Electromagnetism is photon.

So weak interaction is pretty weak but still insanely stronger than gravitation. It works with quarks and their flavors and it is responsible for decay.
Here on left is picture of all six possible flavors of quarks. (There can also be antiflavors). Most of matter in universe is made up by up and down quarks. For example neutrons and protons.
Force carrier for weak interaction is w+ boson w- boson or z0 boson.

I was talking about decay so I will show you how beta decay is made by weak interaction.

There is proton with two up quarks and one down quark. It wants to change to neutron because that particle in which this proton is is not stable.
When proton touches neutrino which is carrying w+ boson, boson will move to proton and change one up quark to down quark which makes up neutron. Neutrino will lose positive charge of boson which means it will turn to electron which makes up beta decay!

For summary I would say that weak interaction is responsible for changing of quarks flavor which is many atributes of quarks.

Well that was quite short but that is probably all.
Dragallur
PS. here are links to previous episodes of four fundamental forces:
https://dragallur.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/1-four-fundamental-forces-prologue/
https://dragallur.wordpress.com/2015/03/21/2-four-fundamental-forces-gravitation/
https://dragallur.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/3-four-fundamental-forces-electromagnetism/