DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS

SOLVING RADIOACTIVE ISOTOPE DECAY PROBLEMS

USING MATLAB PROGRAMMING
JHON JASPER D. APAN

Problem
Radioactive isotopes are atoms with unstable nuclei.
These isotopes disintegrate to form atoms with stable nuclei.
This disintegration is known as radioactive decay. It has
many applications, one of which is carbon dating which is
useful in the fields of archaeology and paleontology.

Carbon dating allows us to determine the age of an object

by observing rate of decay of carbon-14 isotopes (known as
C-14). C-14 has a half-life of 5730 years.

MatLab Codes
If the fossil has 350 grams of C-14, how old is the fossil if function CalculateButton_Callback(hObject, eventdata, handles)
a living sample of that said fossil has 1000 grams of the iso- HalfLife = str2double(get(handles.HalfLifeEdit,'String'));
k=double((log(2))/HalfLife);
tope?
InitialP = str2double(get(handles.InitialPopulationEdit,'String'));
syms P(t)
ode = diff (P,t) == -k*P;
Analysis of the Problem cond = P(0) == InitialP;
ActualSolution = dsolve(ode,cond);
Radioactive decay can be modeled by the differential equa- RemainingP = str2double(get(handles.RemainingAmountEdit,'String'));
tion: Time=double(solve(RemainingP==ActualSolution,t));
set(handles.TimeElapsedSet,'String',Time)
x=linspace(0,Time);
y=subs(ActualSolution,t,x);
plot(x,y,'k-')
where P is the amount of radioactive isotope and k is the de- xlabel('Time')
ylabel('Amount of Isotopes')
cay rate of the isotope which can be expressed as a function of
hold on
half-life, λ: plot(Time,RemainingP,'o','MarkerEdgeColor','r','MarkerFaceColor','r')
hold off
Note: Automatically generated codes from MatLab GUI are omitted due to spatial limitation.

The form of the solution will then be: Graphical User Interface

In our problem, we are given the half-life of the isotope C-14,

an initial amount of the isotope and an amount at time t. From
these, we can determine the age of the fossil which was found
out to be 8678.5.