List of radioactive nuclides by half-life

This is a list of radioactive nuclides (sometimes also called isotopes), ordered by half-life from shortest to longest, in seconds, minutes, hours, days and years. Current methods make it difficult to measure half-lives between approximately 10^{−19} and 10^{−10} seconds.

10^{−24} seconds (yoctoseconds)

Twenty-three yoctoseconds is the time needed to traverse a 7-femtometre distance at the speed of light—around the diameter of a large atomic nucleus.

10^{−21} seconds (zeptoseconds)

10^{−18} seconds (attoseconds)

10^{−12} seconds (picoseconds)

10^{−9} seconds (nanoseconds)

10^{−6} seconds (microseconds)

10^{−3} seconds (milliseconds)

10⁰ seconds

10³ seconds (kiloseconds)

10⁶ seconds (megaseconds)

10⁹ seconds (gigaseconds)

10¹² seconds (teraseconds)

10¹⁵ seconds (petaseconds)

10¹⁸ seconds (exaseconds)

10²¹ seconds (zettaseconds)

10²⁴ seconds (yottaseconds)

10²⁷ seconds (ronnaseconds)

10³⁰ seconds (quettaseconds)

The half-life of tellurium-128 is over 160 trillion times greater than the age of the universe, which is seconds.

See also

• List of elements by stability of isotopes
• List of nuclides
• Orders of magnitude (time)

Notes

External links

• Radioactive isotope table "lists ALL radioactive nuclei with a half-life greater than 1000 years", incorporated in the list above.
• The NUBASE2020 evaluation of nuclear physics properties F.G. Kondev et al. 2021 Chinese Phys. C 45 030001. The PDF of this article lists the half-lives of all known radioactives nuclides.