Recent content by Doscience

I managed to figure this out. I rearranged the expression for Q to get E^{\alpha}_{K}like in my initial attempt but then I took Q out as a common factor which was the key. It was then just a matter of doing about 3 pages of algebra on what was inside the brackets.

Homework Statement In \alpha decay a nucleus X at rest decays to a daughter nucleus Y and an \alpha particle. Conservation of momentum and kinetic energy gives: M_{\alpha}v_{\alpha}+M_{Y}v_{Y}=0 \frac{1}{2}M_{\alpha}v_{\alpha}^{2}+\frac{1}{2}M_{Y}v_{Y}^{2}=Q Where the Q value is the...