Pressure- and chemistry-dependent electron-capture radioactive decay of 7Be, 22Na and 40K in crystalline materials

Details Pressure- and chemistry-dependent electron-capture radioactive decay of 7Be, 22Na and 40K in crystalline materials Pressure- and chemistry-dependent electron-capture radioactive decay of 7Be, 22Na and 40K in crystalline materials

Dec 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006agufmmr53a0978l&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2006, abstract #MR53A-0978

Statistics

Computation

1025 Composition Of The Mantle, 1040 Radiogenic Isotope Geochemistry, 3924 High-Pressure Behavior, 8124 Earth'S Interior: Composition And State (1212, 7207, 7208, 8105), 8130 Heat Generation And Transport

Scientific paper

Radioactive decay plays a central role in planetary sciences as appropriate decay schemes are used to date geological and astronomical processes and radioactivity provides an important source of heat in planetary bodies, both in their early history during accretion and differentiation and also over geological times. The most important isotopes that currently heat the Earth are 40K, 232Th, ^{235}U and 238U. Th and the U isotopes decay by the α process, emitting a He^{4+} core, while 40K decays by β processes, converting a neutron into a proton with the help of an electron. This happens in part by β+ and β^- processes (~89%) and in part by electron capture (~11%). As radioactive decay is a nuclear process it is considered to be insensitive to external factors such as pressure or chemical environment. This has been shown to be true for α, β+ and β^- processes. However, electron capture decay is dependent on the electronic charge density at the nucleus of a compound, which in turn is sensitive to the external environment. Here we investigate the change in decay constant for the electronic capture portion of the 40K decay due to pressure and different chemical environment, along with other electron capture decay schemes for ^{22}Na and 7Be. We apply state-of-the-art all-electron computations of the charge density for these metals, their chloride and oxide forms by using the linearized augmented plane wave method (LAPW). We find that external factors have a small but measurable effect on the decay constants of these isotopes. For 7Be we find the strongest dependence, and much smaller effects on ^{22}Na and 40K due to increased screening by the additional electrons.

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