Week of October 30

This week, I finally went back to Siena after a two week break! Dr. Bellis and I started off by discussing radioactivity, since I'll be looking at the decay modes of certain mesons.

Radioactive decay occurs when an unstable atom emits particles of ionizing radiation, which results in the nucleus of the atom losing energy. The chance that a given particle will decay is constant over time, although it's impossible to predict exactly when this decay will occur (according to quantum theory). The half life is the time taken for a given amount of a radioactive substance to decay to half of its initial value.

To illustrate this process, Dr. Bellis showed me how to plot the radioactive decay for a particle on Python. Since we couldn't obtain real data, I modeled radioactive decay by shaking pennies in a box and removing all of the pennies that were heads up until there was only one penny left. 

Since the chance that any penny will come up heads on any toss is always the same (50%), about half the pennies are left after the first toss. In this model, the half-life is represented by the time it takes for one half of the remaining pennies to be removed (about one toss). Removing a penny is analogous  to the decay of a radioactive nucleus. 

This picture is what the graph looked like on Python. Radioactive decay has an exponential curve.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do any more work since Dr. Bellis had to leave early today.