Proposal
Nuclei which are of importance in radioisotope dating have very long half-lives, and calculations show that they are vulnerable to changes in the strength of the nuclear force. Their half-lives can change drastically. Although the “weak force” is the one responsible for beta-decays, the decay process is nonetheless very sensitive to the strength of the strong force gluing the nucleus together. In this paper, various possible sensitivities of the half-life for nuclear decays are investigated. In recent years, nuclear phase changes, such as the onset or loss of pairing interactions, or the shape transitions such as triaxial to oblate spheroidal and prolate spheroidal, have been a topic of interest among physicists. The pairing interactions, protons to protons or neutrons to neutrons have been found to disappear at high spin or at nuclear “temperatures” of a few tenths of an MeV. We investigate whether the change in nuclear force strength could cause breaking of the pairing bonds, hence leading to the possible loss of superfluidity or to mixed-phase nuclei. Quantum mechanical calculations are presented linking changes in various factors in alpha- and beta-decays to variation of the half-life. Tunneling processes, including nonlinear tunneling mechanisms, are investigated. According to modern theory, the W-particle has a mass-energy of 80.4 GeV and briefly enters the beta-decay process as a virtual particle leading to the emission, say in the beta-minus case, to an electron and an antineutrino. Calculations are given showing the sensitivity of this process to masses of the particles and other quantities which would be influenced by strong force variation. We discuss the linkage between various quantities and mechanisms by which small changes could possibly lead to large changes in the half-life.
Keywords
Radioisotope dating, Nuclear force, Forbidden decays, Phase change, Pairing
Print Reference
Pages 179-192
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Recommended Citation
Chaffin, Eugene F.
(2008)
"Studies of the Dependence of Nuclear Half-lives on Changes in the Strength of the Nuclear Force,"
Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism: Vol. 6, Article 17.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/icc_proceedings/vol6/iss1/17