Radioactive decay law literature

[Chemist@]

What book do you recommend me to read to fully understand the radioactive decay law (equation, derivation, graphs, units)?

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Thanks for the post! Sorry you aren't generating responses at the moment. Do you have any further information, come to any new conclusions or is it possible to reword the post?

 

[Chemist@]

I just need some suggestions.

 

[jtbell]

I think most or all second-year (university) "introduction to modern physics" textbooks discuss the radioactive decay law, e.g. the first three books that I listed in this post:

Struggling with relativistic mechanics questions, need a textbook recommended

 

[BruceW]

yeah... most introductory textbooks will have something on radioactive decay. I'm sure it is a very large field if you want to go into lots of detail. But I'm guessing for the average undergraduate course, the main things to learn are the different basic types of decay, and to be comfortable with the idea of exponential decay of the number of radioactive atoms. i.e. be able to solve simple problems, like "If I have N radioactive atoms, with activity A, then how many will remain at time t ?" Also, if you have more than one kind of radioactive atom, then the equations get slightly more complicated, but the idea is roughly the same. You can solve a differential equation in the numbers of each type of atom, taking into account the possibility that one type of atom decays into another type.

 

[jtbell]

Yeah, all the intro modern books that I've used discuss decay chains and the equations for secular equilibrium.