Becquerel Becquerel The becquerel (; symbol: Bq) is the SI derived unit of radioactivity. One becquerel is defined as the activity of a quantity of radioactive material in which one nucleus decays per second. The becquerel is therefore equivalent to an inverse second, s. The becquerel is named after Henri Becquerel, who shared a Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Marie Curie in 1903 for their work in discovering radioactivity. As with every International System of Units (SI) unit named for a person, the first letter of its symbol is uppercase (Bq). However, when an SI unit is spelled out
Specific activity the radionuclide is given by where "m" is mass number of the radionuclide and "N" is the Avogadro constant. Specific radioactivity "a" is defined as radioactivity per unit mass of the radionuclide: In addition, decay constant "λ" is related to the half-life "T" by the following equation: Thus, specific radioactivity can also be described by This equation is simplified by When the unit of half-life converts a year For example, specific radioactivity of radium-226 with a half-life of 1600 years is obtained by This value derived from radium 226 was defined as unit of radioactivity known as Curie (Ci). Experimentally