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Re: Nuclear decay



Where is the "tunneling" in beta-decay?

Adam was by constitution and proclivity a scientist; I was the same, and
we loved to call ourselves by that great name...Our first memorable
scientific discovery was the law that water and like fluids run downhill,
not up.
Mark Twain, <Extract from Eve's Autobiography>

On Tue, 11 Jul 2000, David Bowman wrote:

Regarding John Cooper's question:
Conventional answer is "NO"
Anyone know otherwise?

The negative conventional answer is correct assuming that we are really
concerned about nuclear *decay*, which is not a thermally activated
process, and is instead, typically, a quantum tunnelling-like process
whose relevant energy scale is on the order of MeV (1 eV = 11604 K).

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