----Original Message----- From: mix...@bigpond.com > Stimulated "decay" is not a possibility. You can't "stimulate" a reaction that's isn't going to happen all by itself anyway over a long enough period, and 64Ni doesn't decay. It's quite stable.
Hi, Robin No, that's technically not correct on two counts, although nickel in general is high on the list of presumed stability since it has a magic number of protons. There is no intrinsic or absolute property of "stability," since it is purely observational - and as we know, many nickel isotopes do decay, despite the magic - notably 63Ni which is lighter than 64Ni. There are many nuclides which are now known to be slightlyradioactive, but forty years were called stable because they have extremely long half-lives and were not observed to decay. My old Oxford reference book has a number of errors, due to recent observation. Secondly, stimulated decay can be the product of a strong stimulant, so to speak, such as a cosmic ray neutrino, muon etc. That was the original context. Of course any sufficiently strong stimulant can give the identical appearance of decay, and to quibble about the semantics of whether it is a reaction or a decay is of no help- since stability is an observed property.
