ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the physics of alpha and beta decay and introduces the reader to additional concepts to explain how the process of radioactive decay works. There are several types of statistical probability distributions, but radioactive materials obey what is known as a Poisson distribution. The “half-life” of a radioactive isotope is the amount of time required for exactly half of the original quantity of the isotope to decay. The first truly scientific studies of radioactive decay were conducted in the mid-1800s by Pierre and Madam Marie Curie, by Frenchman Henri Becquerel, and several years later by Englishman Lord Rutherford, who studied the by-products of radioactive decay in cloud chambers and on exposed photographic films. When Madam Curie and Lord Rutherford first began their study of radioactive decay in the early 1900s, the next layer of nuclear particles—the protons and neutrons—had not been discovered yet.
