Iowa State physicists explain the long, useful lifetime of carbon-14

Iowa State University News Service ^ | Thursday, May 26, 2011 | Mike Krapfl

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The long, slow decay of carbon-14 allows archaeologists to accurately date the relics of history back to 60,000 years.

And while the carbon dating technique is well known and understood (the ratio of carbon-14 to other carbon isotopes is measured to determine the age of objects containing the remnants of any living thing), the reason for carbon-14's slow decay has not been understood. Why, exactly, does carbon-14 have a half-life of nearly 6,000 years while other light atomic nuclei have half-lives of minutes or seconds? (Half-life is the time it takes for the nuclei in a sample to decay to half the original amount.)

"This has been a very significant puzzle to nuclear physicists for several decades," said James Vary, an Iowa State University professor of physics and astronomy. "And the underlying reason turned out to be a fairly exotic one."

The reason involves the strong three-nucleon forces (a nucleon is either a neutron or a proton) within each carbon-14 nucleus. It's all about the simultaneous interactions among any three nucleons and the resulting influence on the decay of carbon-14. And it's no easy task to simulate those interactions.

In this case, it took about 30 million processor-hours on the Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Jaguar has a peak performance of 2.3 quadrillion calculations per second, a speed that topped the list of the world's top 500 supercomputers when the carbon-14 simulations were run.

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some creation scientists measured

I never thought I would see those words arranged like that.