Talk:Valley of stability

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New article notes[edit]

I started this article after much thought and realizing that without such an article there is something of a hole for articles relating to beta decay, stable nuclide, island of stability, etc. and even the neutron. The concept of the valley of stability is common, and the term is in wide spread use. The present article needs quite a lot of development, particularly a discussion describing the energy considerations and how the shape of the valley is roughly a parabola.

On another note, I noted that the common chart of the nuclides often seen on sundry wikipedia pages seems to be plotted in a non-standard way. It is normally neutrons on the abscissa and protons on the ordinate, from what I can tell. Bdushaw (talk) 21:38, 12 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Magic numbers[edit]

Still on the to do list for this article is a discussion of magic numbers. The figures are indicating those values, though no mention is made in the figure captions as to what the horizontal/vertical lines mean. Also missing is a discussion of what the delta means in binding energy - the odd/even nuclide effects. All of which relate to the fact that the valley of stability is not a smooth function for binding energy - there are great variations depending on how stable particular nuclide configurations are. These sorts of complications are a bit beyond what I am willing to tackle right now; this is getting to be fairly technical nuclear physics. Bdushaw (talk) 10:41, 6 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Nickel-63 Red Dot[edit]

Why is ⁶³Ni highlighted with a red dot on all three charts? Am I counting this right? It seems to be one position to the right of ⁶²Ni, which "has the highest mean binding energy of all nuclides". At the source, the IAEA Live Chart of Nuclides, a red dot indicates a kind of cursor position.

Should ⁶²Ni be highlighted instead? Then the red dot should be described in the caption or color key. Or was this just a mistake in the screen capture, and no position should be highlighted? Either way it's not immediately clear what color should go at ⁶³Ni in all the charts. That isotope is unstable, with a half life 100.1 years. Other possibilities?

Other fun facts it took a while to determine. I think the lower-left-most corner of each chart is for 1 proton 0 neutrons, or ¹Hydrogen, chopping off the position for the lone neutron, which is included on the charts at the IAEA site. Each horizontal line shows the value of the positions above it. And each vertical line to the right of it. Bob Stein - VisiBone (talk) 15:02, 5 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

You have sharp eyes... I've been the sole author of this article so far, strangely, happy to have someone review it. The red dot...I believe it is just an artifact, the nuclide that was highlighted (randomly) when I took the screenshots to form the figures. I can work on just removing the red dot (have gimp, will remove). Not sure what happened to the lone neutron; forming these figures was not altogether easy, being screenshots that were then doctored up. The issue of the lines can be remedied by just a caption development, yes? Bdushaw (talk) 15:28, 5 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]