Radioactive decay
The combined effects of these forces produces a number of different phenomena in which energy may be released by rearrangement of particles in the nucleus, or else the change of one type of particle into others. These rearrangements and transformations may be hindered energetically so that they do not occur immediately. In certain cases, random quantum vacuum fluctuations are theorized to promote relaxation to a lower energy state (the "decay") in a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling. Radioactive decay half-life of nuclides has been measured over timescales of 55 orders of magnitude, from 2.3 × 10−23 seconds (for hydrogen-7) to 6.9 × 1031 seconds (for tellurium-128). The limits of these timescales are set by the sensitivity of instrumentation only, and there are no known natural limits to how brief or long a decay half-life for radioactive decay of a radionuclide may be.