Isotopes of mercury
Open-knowledge reference entry
There are seven stable isotopes of mercury (80Hg) with 202Hg being the most abundant (29.74%). The longest-lived radioisotopes are 194Hg with a half-life of 447 years, and 203Hg with a half-life of 46.61 days. Most of the remaining 40 radioisotopes have half-lives that are less than a day. The odd natural isotopes 199Hg and 201Hg are NMR-active, having spin of 1/2 and 3/2 respectively; as NMR is best with spin 1/2, the former is normally used. All isotopes of mercury are either radioactive or observationally stable, meaning that they are predicted to be radioactive but no actual decay has been observed. These isotopes are predicted to undergo either alpha decay or double beta decay.
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This entry incorporates text from “Isotopes of mercury” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.