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To recap, we made our sample of curium by exposing plutonium to a never-ending shower of helium atoms coming from another donor source, in this case a smidge of hellatiously active polonium. This abuse would typically spell the death of whichever hapless atom was in the way but in the particular case of plutonium the inbound salvos are absorbed into the nucleus rather than destroy it. The fusion of a helium and a plutonium atom result in a brand new entity: curium! And that, technically, is the end of the story.
Except not really.
You see, the birth of that atom was anything but a clean and gentle process. It's an apocalyptic war down there. That new curium atom, along with the remaining screen of plutonium ones, are still being bombarded by an unrelenting river of particles. As if ducking that artillery wasn't enough, the curium newborn has to suffer intestinal problems of its own. Deep down in its guts the new guys are not at all getting along with the established residents. Because of who knows what reason, it has been written into the very bylaws of physics that a neighborhood consisting of 96 protons and 146 neutrons, let's call it Cm-242, is such an awkward arrangement that on average it's all of 163 days before tension ends with someone getting kicked out. The evicted tenants fly off in all directions with some of them crashing into other still-stable-for-now Cm-242 atoms. A wayward neutron knocking at the door is welcomed, temporarily, turning it Cm-243 now.
And like a surging refugee camp, the curium atoms reluctantly continue to admit new neutrons incrementally until the census reaches all the way up to Cm-249. And what happens then? Well, at that point the party has become just a bit too rowdy. What happens next is a process physicists have dryly termed "beta decay emission" which disguises what a juicy, scandalous thing is really going on. One of those neutrons becomes so enraged, I mean charged, that it spontaneously promotes itself into a proton. Et voila ladies and gentlemen! As we all know by now, adding a new proton completely changes the chemical behavior and earns it placement into the next higher bin on the periodic table. We now have a brand new atom of berkelium.
But just as the case with curium, this berkelium was also birthed under wartime conditions. It will need to deal with that same unforgiving hailstorm of particles and also its own inhouse tussles. Still, however imperfect an analogy, you can think of that deputized new proton being able to hold down the rabble a bit better now because berkelium-249 has a pretty decent half life of 330 days. That's nearly a full year, on average, before things in the 'hood become unsettled again. This leaves the curious oddity of finding in these nominally curium samples an ever increasing number of berkelium atoms. Those good with math will be able to compute the trajectory of the quantities of the various isotopes as a plotted line on a chart to show, for example, at which point in the future the largest concentration of these atoms will be reached. A rough calculation indicates that this will happen at some point in the next five years (ca. 2030) when inside this little ampule a theoretical max 1,000 attendees will be rocking the uniform for team Bk-249!
To recap, we made our sample of curium by exposing plutonium to a never-ending shower of helium atoms coming from another donor source, in this case a smidge of hellatiously active polonium. This abuse would typically spell the death of whichever hapless atom was in the way but in the particular case of plutonium the inbound salvos are absorbed into the nucleus rather than destroy it. The fusion of a helium and a plutonium atom result in a brand new entity: curium! And that, technically, is the end of the story.
Except not really.
You see, the birth of that atom was anything but a clean and gentle process. It's an apocalyptic war down there. That new curium atom, along with the remaining screen of plutonium ones, are still being bombarded by an unrelenting river of particles. As if ducking that artillery wasn't enough, the curium newborn has to suffer intestinal problems of its own. Deep down in its guts the new guys are not at all getting along with the established residents. Because of who knows what reason, it has been written into the very bylaws of physics that a neighborhood consisting of 96 protons and 146 neutrons, let's call it Cm-242, is such an awkward arrangement that on average it's all of 163 days before tension ends with someone getting kicked out. The evicted tenants fly off in all directions with some of them crashing into other still-stable-for-now Cm-242 atoms. A wayward neutron knocking at the door is welcomed, temporarily, turning it Cm-243 now.
And like a surging refugee camp, the curium atoms reluctantly continue to admit new neutrons incrementally until the census reaches all the way up to Cm-249. And what happens then? Well, at that point the party has become just a bit too rowdy. What happens next is a process physicists have dryly termed "beta decay emission" which disguises what a juicy, scandalous thing is really going on. One of those neutrons becomes so enraged, I mean charged, that it spontaneously promotes itself into a proton. Et voila ladies and gentlemen! As we all know by now, adding a new proton completely changes the chemical behavior and earns it placement into the next higher bin on the periodic table. We now have a brand new atom of berkelium.
But just as the case with curium, this berkelium was also birthed under wartime conditions. It will need to deal with that same unforgiving hailstorm of particles and also its own inhouse tussles. Still, however imperfect an analogy, you can think of that deputized new proton being able to hold down the rabble a bit better now because berkelium-249 has a pretty decent half life of 330 days. That's nearly a full year, on average, before things in the 'hood become unsettled again. This leaves the curious oddity of finding in these nominally curium samples an ever increasing number of berkelium atoms. Those good with math will be able to compute the trajectory of the quantities of the various isotopes as a plotted line on a chart to show, for example, at which point in the future the largest concentration of these atoms will be reached. A rough calculation indicates that this will happen at some point in the next five years (ca. 2030) when inside this little ampule a theoretical max 1,000 attendees will be rocking the uniform for team Bk-249!