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The Half-Life of 14C—Why Is It So Long?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2019

Walter Kutschera
Walter Kutschera*
Affiliation:
University of Vienna, Faculty of Physics – Isotope Physics, Vienna Environmental Research Accelerator (VERA), Währinger Str. 17, A-1090 Vienna, Austria
*
Corresponding author. Email: walter.kutschera@univie.ac.at.
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Abstract

The half-life of radiocarbon (14C) is 5700 ± 30 yr, which makes it particularly useful for dating in archaeology. However, only an exceptional hindrance of the beta decay from 14C to 14N—a so-called Gamow-Teller ß-decay—makes this half-life so long. A normal strength would result in a half-life of only a few days, completely useless for archaeological dating. The unusual hindrance is based on the nuclear structure of the two nuclei, resulting in strongly destructive interferences of the nuclear transition matrix element. Nuclear model calculation with great computational efforts have been performed in the literature to reproduce the very low transition probability. Here, we will attempt to describe the nuclear physics behind this most unusual half-life.

Keywords

half-lifenuclear structureradiocarbon dating
Type
Conference Paper
Information
Radiocarbon , Volume 61 , Issue 5: Radiocarbon 2018 Conference Proceedings Trondheim, Norway, June 17–22, 2018 Part 1 of 2 , October 2019 , pp. 1135 - 1142
Copyright
© 2019 by the Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona 

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Footnotes

Selected Papers from the 23rd International Radiocarbon Conference, Trondheim, Norway, 17–22 June, 2018

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