Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-particle-and-nuclear-physics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2018/section-a/a1/b/solution
Past exam of the particle and nuclear physics course of the University of Cambridge 2018 Section A A1 b Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-18
For gamma decay, the nuclear gamma-ray multipole selection rules require the radiation's angular momentum to satisfy the triangle inequalityHere , so . A real emitted photon has no monopole radiation mode, leaving .
The two nuclear quantum states have the same parity. An electric multipole has parity factor , while a magnetic multipole has factor . Thus electric radiation requires even and magnetic radiation odd :In particular, an nuclear transition cannot emit the single real photon requested here; processes such as internal conversion are different decay channels.
For usual nuclear gamma ray energies, , where and is the nuclear size. Higher multipole radiation orders bring extra powers of this small parameter, so and are the likely important contributions, with , and generally much smaller. Often is dominant, but an allowed matrix element can be hindered and an transition can be collectively enhanced. The quantum numbers alone do not fix a numerical relative contribution or an unconditional ordering of the and rates.
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