The chart of the nuclides in your terminal. Written in Rust.
Neutrons run across, protons up, one cell per nuclide, 3,386 of them. The valley of stability is not drawn: it falls out of the data, the way the main sequence falls out of a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.
Press Enter on uranium-238 and follow it down fourteen steps to lead-206, every half-life on the way.
- 3,386 nuclides from the IAEA's evaluated ground-state table: half-lives, decay modes with their branchings, spin and parity, binding energy per nucleon, mass excess, natural abundance, and the year each was first reported
- Walk it with the arrow keys. Left and right run along one element's
isotopes, skipping the gaps; up and down change element, keeping near
the same neutron number.
Tabhops to the next stable nuclide, which is a quick way to walk the valley floor - Decay chains (
Enter): follow the dominant mode down to something stable. U-238 lands on Pb-206 in fourteen steps, Th-232 on Pb-208 in ten. Fission and unknown modes end a chain honestly rather than guessing a daughter - Five colour modes (1-5, or
m): decay mode, half-life on a log scale over 26 decades, binding energy per nucleon (the iron peak is right there), natural abundance, and the year first reported, which fills the chart outward over a century - The whole chart at once (
z): all 3,386 in braille, eight nuclides per character, 90×30 cells - Find one (
/) the way you would say it:U-238,fe56,14C - Ask Claude (
c) about the nuclide you are looking at, with its numbers and decay chain as context - Export (
e) the whole table to~/isotopes.csv, ordered by the current colour mode - Offline and idle-free: the table ships inside the binary, and the app blocks on a keypress like the rest of the suite
curl -L "https://github.com/isene/isotopes/releases/latest/download/isotopes-linux-x86_64" \
-o ~/bin/isotopes && chmod +x ~/bin/isotopesOr build it: cargo build --release. It needs
crust checked out beside it.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| ← →, h l | Along one element's isotopes, skipping the gaps |
| ↑ ↓, k j | Up and down the elements, keeping near the same N |
| PgUp/PgDn, K J | Ten elements at a time |
| Tab, Shift+Tab | Next stable nuclide up / down the chart |
| Home / End | Lightest / heaviest isotope of this element |
| g / G | Hydrogen / the heaviest element |
| Enter | Follow the decay chain to its stable end |
| 1-5, m | Colour by decay mode, half-life, binding energy, abundance, year |
| z | The whole chart at once, in braille |
| / | Find a nuclide: U-238, fe56, 14C |
| c | Ask Claude about this nuclide |
| e | Write the table to ~/isotopes.csv |
| r | Redraw from scratch |
| ? | Help |
| q | Quit |
isotopes # opens on U-238
isotopes C-14 # or fe56, 14C, "U 235"
isotopes --helpThe IAEA Nuclear Data Section live chart API, ground states only, fetched once and compiled in. Their evaluations rest on ENSDF and the Atomic Mass Evaluation.
Two things worth knowing about what you are looking at:
- A chain follows the dominant mode only. Bi-212 splits 64/36 between β− and α, and this app takes the 64. The detail line shows every branch, so you can see where it forked.
- Branchings below a hundredth of a percent read as "tiny" rather than as twelve zeroes. U-234 really does emit magnesium-28, about once in ten trillion decays.
See the Fe₂O₃ suite overview and the landing page. It sits next to elements (the periodic table), stars (the HR diagram) and particles (the Standard Model).
Public domain (Unlicense). Take it, fork it, or ignore it.