Silver Isotopes

Naturally occurring silver is composed of two stable isotopes, Ag and Ag, with Ag being the most abundant (51.839% natural abundance). Silver’s isotopes are almost equal in abundance, something which is rare in the periodic table. Silver’s atomic weight is 107.8682(2) g/mol. Twenty-eight radioisotopes have been characterized, the most stable being Ag with a half-life of 41.29 days,Ag with a half-life of 7.45 days, and Ag with a half-life of 3.13 hours. This element has numerous meta states, the most stable being Ag (t_1/2 = 418 years), Ag (t_1/2 = 249.79 days) and Ag (t_1/2 = 8.28 days). All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives that are less than an hour, and the majority of these have half-lives that are less than 3 minutes.

Isotopes of silver range in relative atomic mass from 93.943 (Ag) to 126.936 (Ag); the primary decay mode before the most abundant stable isotope, Ag, is electron capture and the primary mode after is beta decay. The primary decay products before Ag are palladium (element 46) isotopes, and the primary products after are cadmium (element 48) isotopes.

The palladium isotope Pd decays by beta emission to Ag with a half-life of 6.5 million years. Iron meteorites are the only objects with a high-enough palladium-to-silver ratio to yield measurable variations in Ag abundance. Radiogenic Ag was first discovered in the Santa Clara meteorite in 1978. The discoverers suggest that the coalescence and differentiation of iron-cored small planets may have occurred 10 million years after a nucleosynthetic event. Pd–Ag correlations observed in bodies that have clearly been melted since the accretion of the solar system must reflect the presence of unstable nuclides in the early solar system.

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