In reply to Eric Walker's message of Sun, 1 Feb 2015 11:48:59 -0800: Hi Eric,
It must be one of the thousands that I deleted unread, however I wouldn't expect that sort of thing to affect gamma radiation. OTOH it certainly will affect *measured* alpha radiation. The travel distance of an alpha particle in a solid is only a few microns, so when the particle size gets much larger than about 10 microns, many of the alphas are stopped within the particle and never reach any detector. >Hi, > >Sometime back there was a Vortex thread where we were looking at the >question of whether electron charge density might be play a role in gamma >decays. A point in question was whether gamma branches in the decays of >solid radioisotopes might be affected by electron charge density. A >counterexample that was raised was that there would then be a surface >affect that is not seen -- for example, if the surface area of a sample was >greatly increased, perhaps there would be more gamma activity in certain >radionuclides. The suggestion to be explored (and, I think, disproven) was >that if the surface area was high, e.g., the sample comes in the form of a >fine powder, there would be more gamma activity, and if the surface area is >low, there would be less gamma activity. > >Does anyone recall this thread? I'm having trouble tracking it down. > >Eric Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
