What is Half-life?

1. Half-life is the time taken for half of the radioactive nuclei to decay.

2. Half-life is the time taken

for the count rate to fall to half of its original reading.

There are a number of ways to define half-life. Remember

one of the above definitions, it may be useful in the exams.

An Explanation of Half-life.

A radioactive material will have some nuclei that are stable

and some that are unstable. The stable nuclei don't change,
that is what stable means. In the picture below,
the unstable nuclei (shown as brown balls) will change
into stable nuclei (shown as purple balls) and emit radioactivity.

Half-life is a measure of the time taken for

the unstable nuclei to change into stable nuclei.

Different substances do this at different rates.

Some do it very quickly and half of the unstable nuclei decay

in less than one second.
For example, lithium-8 has a half-life of only 085 seconds.

Some do it very slowly and half of the unstable nuclei take

billions of years to decay.
For example, uranium-238 has a half-life of 451 billion years.

Remember that half-life is an amount of time.

In the same amount of time, the picture on the right above
will lose half of the remaining unstable nuclei.
 Measuring Half-life from a Graph.

How can Half-life be Measured from a Graph?

A graph showing how

the count rate decreases as time goes by
will have a curve like the one shown in the picture below.
For any particular radioisotope the count rate and time will
be different but the shape of the curve will be the same.

The easiest way to measure the half-life from the graph is

to
 1. Read the original count rate at zero days.
On our graph the reading is 1640 counts.

2. Go down to half the original count rate (820 counts)

and draw a horizontal line to the curve.
Then draw a vertical line down from the curve.
You can read off the half-life where
the line crosses the time axis.

On our graph the half-life is 20 days.