Potassium Potassium Potassium is a chemical element with symbol K (from Neo-Latin "kalium") and atomic number 19. It was first isolated from potash, the ashes of plants, from which its name derives. In the periodic table, potassium is one of the alkali metals. All of the alkali metals have a single valence electron in the outer electron shell, which is easily removed to create an ion with a positive charge – a cation, which combines with anions to form salts. Potassium in nature occurs only in ionic salts. Elemental potassium is a soft silvery-white alkali metal that oxidizes rapidly in air
Effective atomic number for the photoelectric process which incorporates a ‘constant’ of 2.64 x 10, which is in fact not a constant but rather a function of the photon energy. A linear relationship between Z has been shown for a limited number of compounds for low-energy x-rays, but within the same publication it is shown that many compounds do not lie on the same trendline (Spiers "et al." 1946). As such, for polyenergetic photon sources (in particular, for applications such as radiotherapy), the effective atomic number varies significantly with energy (Taylor "et al." 2008). As shown by Taylor "et al." (2008), it is