I understand something can become radioactive when it is polluted with radioactive material, The Claw (the crane which was used to clean up Chernobyl) comes into my mind. There is bad stuff on it -> radioactive.
But what about materials which are exposed to emission only? What changes in the material?
What happens for example when a steal plate is put inside LHC and bombarded with high energy particles? Does the protons collide with the electrons, become neutrons, so the iron in the “steal plate” changes into an isotope which is unstable, so it becomes radioactive?
In: Physics
Well, most of the time it doesn’t. When it does, it’s almost always from neutron radiation, where neutrons stick to the nucleus. A nucleus with the wrong number of neutrons is not stable. Other kinds of particle radiation like alpha particles *can* do this, but neutrons are hands down the most common.
Protons do exactly the same thing. They just stick to the nucleus, changing it into a different (and potentially unstable) isotope.
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