Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The nucleus (seen here in ...

Physicists Maria Goeppert Mayer and J. Hans D. Jensen develop a theory of the nucleus as composed of shells of protons and neutrons. It explains why nuclei with certain “magic numbers” of protons and ...

Heavier nuclei are less stable—that’s something we all learned in school. Adding more nucleons (protons and neutrons) makes atoms more likely to break apart. It’s one reason why elements heavier than ...

Individual protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei turn out not to behave according to the predictions made by existing theoretical models. This surprising conclusion, reached by an international team ...

Image of the emission of 4 neutrons (blue spheres) from the exotic nucleus oxygen-28, which consists of 8 protons (red spheres) and 20 neutrons. According to the traditional model, the nucleons inside ...

The inclusion of the long-neglected tensor force into theoretical models revises our understanding of ‘magic numbers’ in the atomic nucleus The world of nuclear physics is a relatively ordered one.

Benjamin Mottelson was a US-born physicist who specialized in theoretical work on the structure of the atomic nucleus. During the 1950s, in close collaboration with his Danish colleague Aage Bohr, ...

In a surprising turn of events, an international team of scientists has found that lead-208 (208 Pb), the heaviest known "doubly magic" nucleus, exhibits unexpected shape characteristics that current ...

An international team of physicists has found strong evidence for the existence of a new ‘doubly magic’ nucleus with an unconventional configuration of neutrons. The oxygen–24 nucleus is also the ...