Encyclopedia > Electron capture

  Article Content

Electron capture

Electron capture is a decay mode for chemical elements that will occur when there are too many protons in the nucleus of an atom, and there isn't enough energy to emit a positron.

In this case, one of the orbital electrons is captured by a proton in the nucleus, forming a neutron and a neutrino. Since the proton is essentially changed to a neutron, the number of neutrons increases by 1, the number of protons decreases by 1, and the atomic mass remains unchanged. By changing the number of protons, electron capture transforms the nuclide into a new element.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Bugatti

... stage. The company went bankrupt in 1995. In 1998 the Bugatti name was bought by VAG, but by mid-2002 only a handful of prototypes had been ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 40.5 ms