Nuclear Stability
Nuclear Stability can be explained, by three forces interacting with each other inside a nucleus.
- The main force responsible for the stability of the nucleus is the Strong Nuclear Force, which is responsible for nucleus cohesiveness by pushing the different nucleons together and is also responsible for the generation of alpha radiation.
- Electromagnetic Repulsion force acts between protons, but its magnitude is far less than the strong nuclear force.
- The third of these is the ‘weak‘ force, which works inside individual nucleons and can occasionally result in the change of a neutron into a proton (or vice versa), accompanied by the production of beta radiation.
The image shown below shows the nuclear stability and its bond breakage.
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Nuclear Force
Nuclear forces, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force are two of the four fundamental forces of nature other than electromagnetic and gravitational forces. Unlike Coulomb’s Law or Newton’s Law of Gravitation, there is no simple mathematical way to describe nuclear forces. Nuclear forces are one of the strongest forces of nature.
According to the standard model nuclear forces arise due to the exchange of gluons. Since nucleons are made up of quarks, i.e., neutron (udd) and proton (uud), where u and d denote up and down quarks, respectively. The exchange of quarks between the neutron and proton keeps them intact inside the nucleus.