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
The two typical ways an object becomes radioactive are either neutron bombardment or being placed in a beam line like you mentioned (LHC). Exposure to normal radioactive sealed sources aren’t strong enough to trigger a transmutation outside of neutron sources. To make an object radioactive it mainly involves knocking something loose from the nucleus (proton or neutron) or adding something to it to trigger a transmutation. There are other cases such as photofission which is a nucleus getting split by high energy photons (xray/gamma) and also secondary processes like electron capture which happens to balance proton to neutron ratios in the nucleus. Regardless of how it happens the object is referred to as being “activated” as it now has radioisotopes embedded in it.
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