Checking the Goodness of Fit of the Poisson Distribution in R for Alpha Decay by Americium-241

Introduction

Today, I will discuss the alpha decay of americium-241 and use R to model the number of emissions from a real data set with the Poisson distribution.  I was especially intrigued in learning about the use of Am-241 in smoke detectors, and I will elaborate on this clever application.  I will then use the Pearson chi-squared test to check the goodness of fit of my model.  The R script for the full analysis is given at the end of the post; there is a particularly useful code for superscripting the mass number of a chemical isotope in the title of a plot.  While there are many examples of superscripts in plot titles and axes that can be found on the web, none showed how to put the superscript before a text.  I hope that this and other tricks in this script are of use to you.

 

Smoke Detector with Americium-241

Source: Creative Commons via Eric Mason’s Coursework for Physics 241 at Stanford University

Displaying Isotopic Abundance Percentages with Bar Charts and Pie Charts

The Structure of an Atom

An atom consists of a nucleus at the centre and electrons moving around it.  The nucleus contains a mixture of protons and neutrons.  For most purposes in chemistry, the two most important properties about these 3 types of particles are their masses and charges.  In terms of charge, protons are positive, electrons are negative, and neutrons are neutral.  A proton’s mass is roughly the same as a neutron’s mass, but a proton is almost 2,000 times heavier than an electron.

This image shows a lithium atom, which has 3 electrons, 3 protons, and 4 neutrons.  

Source: Wikimedia Commons