| Week of | Jan 14 | Feb 4 | Mar 4 | Apr 1
| Phy 360 page |
| Jan 21 | Feb 11 | Mar 18 | Apr 15 | ||
| Jan 28 | Feb 18 | Mar 25 | Apr 22 | ||
| Feb 25 |
22 Apr Look at the radioactive decay chains in a bit more detail, plotting some graphs and seeing how the activity can increase as a function of time. Definitions of the units for activity: The Curie is 3.7 x 1010 decays/second. This and the milliCurie and the microCurie are common units. The official SI unit is the Becquerel, which is one decay per second.
The units of absorption, or dosage are Roentgen, RAD, and REM. These are similar, and there are precise technical definitions of them, but its easier to remember that the "mean lethal dose" for whole-body irradiation is about 500 REM.
Start on the idea of cross sections, beginning with the absorption cross section and the total scattering cross section.
24 Apr Re-state the definitions of absorption and scattering cross sections. Note the wide variation in the experimental values of the neutron absorption cross section for various isotopes --- the "cross section" has nothing to do with the geometric "area" pr2.
Derive the exponential drop in flux as particles are absorbed in a thick slab of material.
