31.4 Nuclear decay and conservation laws  (Page 3/25)

Beta decay

There are actually three types of beta decay    . The first discovered was “ordinary” beta decay and is called ${\beta }^{-}$ decay or electron emission. The symbol ${\beta }^{-}$ represents an electron emitted in nuclear beta decay . Cobalt-60 is a nuclide that ${\beta }^{-}$ decays in the following manner:

The neutrino    is a particle emitted in beta decay that was unanticipated and is of fundamental importance. The neutrino was not even proposed in theory until more than 20 years after beta decay was known to involve electron emissions. Neutrinos are so difficult to detect that the first direct evidence of them was not obtained until 1953. Neutrinos are nearly massless, have no charge, and do not interact with nucleons via the strong nuclear force. Traveling approximately at the speed of light, they have little time to affect any nucleus they encounter. This is, owing to the fact that they have no charge (and they are not EM waves), they do not interact through the EM force. They do interact via the relatively weak and very short range weak nuclear force. Consequently, neutrinos escape almost any detector and penetrate almost any shielding. However, neutrinos do carry energy, angular momentum (they are fermions with half-integral spin), and linear momentum away from a beta decay. When accurate measurements of beta decay were made, it became apparent that energy, angular momentum, and linear momentum were not accounted for by the daughter nucleus and electron alone. Either a previously unsuspected particle was carrying them away, or three conservation laws were being violated. Wolfgang Pauli made a formal proposal for the existence of neutrinos in 1930. The Italian-born American physicist Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) gave neutrinos their name, meaning little neutral ones, when he developed a sophisticated theory of beta decay (see [link] ). Part of Fermi’s theory was the identification of the weak nuclear force as being distinct from the strong nuclear force and in fact responsible for beta decay.

The neutrino also reveals a new conservation law. There are various families of particles, one of which is the electron family. We propose that the number of members of the electron family is constant in any process or any closed system. In our example of beta decay, there are no members of the electron family present before the decay, but after, there is an electron and a neutrino. So electrons are given an electron family number of $+1$ . The neutrino in ${\beta }^{-}$ decay is an electron’s antineutrino    , given the symbol ${\overline{\nu }}_e$ , where $\nu$ is the Greek letter nu, and the subscript e means this neutrino is related to the electron. The bar indicates this is a particle of antimatter    . (All particles have antimatter counterparts that are nearly identical except that they have the opposite charge. Antimatter is almost entirely absent on Earth, but it is found in nuclear decay and other nuclear and particle reactions as well as in outer space.) The electron’s antineutrino ${\overline{\nu }}_e$ , being antimatter, has an electron family number of $\mathrm{–1}$ . The total is zero, before and after the decay. The new conservation law, obeyed in all circumstances, states that the total electron family number is constant . An electron cannot be created without also creating an antimatter family member. This law is analogous to the conservation of charge in a situation where total charge is originally zero, and equal amounts of positive and negative charge must be created in a reaction to keep the total zero.