The Half-life

The time required for one-half of a reactant’s amount to be consumed is known as half-life of a reaction. The half of the remaining reactant’s concentration is consumed with every successive half-life. As a result of decay during the half-life of radioactive elements emission of radiations occurs. The process of half life is very important for the process of equation balancing to go on. Online balancing chemical equations calculator can make it easy to balance chemical equations online.

Let us take an example of H2O2 (hydrogen peroxide) decomposition for this, during its first-life from 0.00 hours to 6.00 hours, its concentration decreases from 1.000 M to 0.500 M. As for its second half-life from 6.00 hours to 12.00 hours its concentration decreases from 0.500 M to 0.250 M and for the third half-life it changes from 0.250 M to 0.125 M.

Therefore, we noticed with every succeeding time interval of 6 hours the hydrogen peroxide concentration reduces by one half. The first-order reaction’s half-life isn’t dependent upon the reactant’s concentration. While on the other hand, other successive order’s half-life depends on the reactants’ concentration.

The characteristic way and particular property in which several unstable nuclei decay is known as half-life and that tool helps you to find the half life value is known as half life calculator chemistryLinks to an external site.. This radioactive decay is usually of three types, the alpha, beta and gamma. The gamma decay is a comparatively rapid process than alpha and beta decay.

In terms of radioactivity, the time interval needed by the one-half atomic nuclei in a radioactive sample to decay is called half-life. The ‘half-life’ of a radioactive nucleus is one of its main features with the nature of radiation it emits.

Half life also helps a chemist to work on finding molecular weight. You can find molecular weight calculatorLinks to an external site. for calculating how many elements are in the periodic table?

It decides how much it will degrade and how long we must be concerned with its radiations. Half-lives can be as short as a fraction of a second or as long as billions of years. The smaller the nuclear activity, the longer the nucleus' half-life.

A nucleus with a million times longer half-life would be a million times less radioactive than one with a million times shorter half-life. Nuclei with a shorter half-life decay more quickly, whereas those with a longer half-life decay more slowly.

Importance of Half-life:

The process of half-life facilitates mankind in a wide variety of disciplines as it is the most helpful way to find out the speed of a decay. Half-life also helps to date the age of artifacts.

Moreover, the half-life is used to calculate the time required to store radioactive waste till it’s safe to dispose of them. The calculation of half life makes it easy for chemists to balance the chemical equation using a chemical equation product calculatorLinks to an external site.. It saves a lot of time for manually balancing an equation. Let us see in detail why half-life is important among different disciplines.

Geology

The knowledge of half-life is used by geologists and archeologists in the process of carbon dating. Carbon dating is a process in which scientists utilize half-life technique in finding the age of organic compounds.

For example, to identify the age of a sample scientists imply the ratio of carbon 14 to nitrogen 14, because when the death of an organism occurs it stops producing carbon 14 and during the beta decay carbon 14 becomes nitrogen 14. They simply calculate how much of carbon 14 has been transformed to nitrogen 14. 

Medical Field

In medicine, the radioactive isotopes are used to diminish tumors in radiotherapies and then remove it through surgery, also in inoperable tumors to destroy cancer cells. For example, the Cobalt 60 decays into stable nickel, and releases relatively high-energy gamma rays. This technique has now been replaced by electron beam radiation therapy systems.

Radioactive Material Handling

Thus having the knowledge of half-life is important as it facilitates mankind to determine when it is safe to handle any sample of radioactive substance. To know this, we follow the rule, when the radioactivity of a sample has dropped down the detection limits it is safe to deal with. And this happens after 10 half-lives.