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Q. Binding energy per nucleon relation with mass number

Atoms

Solution:

The variation of average binding energy per nucleon with mass number A is shown in figure.
image
Average binding energy per nucleon for light nuclei like $_1H^1,_1H^2,\, \, _1H^3$ is small. For mass numbers ranging from 2 to 20, there are sharply defined peaks corresponding to $_2He^4,_6C^{12},_8O^{16} etc.$ The binding energy curve has a broad maximum in the range A = 30 to A = 120 corresponding to average binding energy per nucleon = 8.5 MeV. The peak value of the maximum is 8.8 MeV/nucleon for $_{26}Fe^{56}.$ As the mass number increases, the binding energy per nucleon decreases gradually falling to about 7.6 MeV per nucleon for $_{92}U^{238}.$