Following on from the ETAW post about Radioactive Dice, I started thinking about a special class of nucleus that I’m calling “dice nuclei”: a die nucleus is one that has the same decay constant as a particular die [1].

In the previous post I used niobium-83 as an example: it has a decay constant of 0.169 whereas a six-sided die has a decay constant of 0.166.

A 4-sided die has a decay constant of 0.25. Lanthanum-120 has a decay constant of 0.25, rhenium-166 has a decay constant of 0.247 and mercury-180 has a decay constant of 0.271.

A 6-sided die has a decay constant of 0.166, as mentioned above niobium-83 has a decay constant of 0.169.

An 8-sided die has a decay constant of 0.125; barium-118 has a decay constant of 0.133.

A 10-sided die has a decay constant of 0.1; lutetium-157 has a decay constant of 0.101.

A 12-sided die has a decay constant of 0.083; scandium-52 has a decay constant of 0.083.

A 20-sided die has a decay constant of 0.05; calcium-50 has a decay constant of 0.0498.

[1] I’m using the standard unit for decay constant, s^-1.