At 07:37 PM 5/6/2010, [email protected] wrote:
In reply to [email protected]'s message of Fri, 07 May 2010 09:22:28 +1000: Hi, [snip] Oops, I got this wrong. I used the total energy when I should have used the FWHH, which I don't know, however a rough idea may be obtained by assuming the same ratio of FWHH to total as for the ground state. That yields a FWHH energy of ( 6.8 eV / 91 keV )* 47.6 MeV = 3.6 keV. This in turn yields a half life of 1.8E-19 sec. , during which time light can travel a distance of 0.5 Angstrom. Still not really enough to communicate with the lattice, though it might be enough to "boil off" the local atoms electrons.
Well, that's a relief. I still don't know how much energy the nucleus can radiate in even the ordinary half-life of 6.7 x 10-17 sec.
