PROJECT #1
Due Friday, January 15 (First half by Tuesday, January 12)
Radioactive Decay with Style
Radioactive dating is extremely important in determing the
age of the Earth as well as understanding the formation of
stars, planets, and the elements. Suppose there is an
unstable nuclei, Blondinium, that decays into another unstable
nuclei, Owenium. Blondinium has
a lifetime of 500 million years, and Owenium has a lifetime
of 2 billion years. According to Supernova theory, only Blondinium
is produced in supernova explosions. Write a computer program to
compute the relative abundances of Blondinium to Owenium, and
comment on the possibility of inferring the age of meteorites containing
these nuclei. (See problem 4 in Chapter 1.)
By class-time on Tuesday, January 12, you should have a working
program written to solve the standard radioactive decay problem.
We will be using this in class!
Your final report should be written in the form of a Physical Review Letter
and should include:
- An abstract summarizing your work
- An introduction motivating your work (why is this problem intersting?)
- A brief description of you numerical method
- Proof that your code works (how did you test it?)
- Graph(s) of your results
- A discussion of what your results mean (how can you use them to
date a meteorite?)