One of the most sought-after goals in nuclear physics is an understanding of the structure of superheavy elements in the so-called "island of stability". These nuclei contain a large number of protons ...

The Structure of the Nucleus The electrons in an atom tend to occupy distinct shells. What about particles in the nucleus? The "magic numbers" of the isotope chart suggest that they also have a shell ...

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., June 1, 2010 -- Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the University of Tennessee (UT) and six collaborating universities have performed an ...

The assumption that the attractive nuclear force is independent of the charge of the individual nucleons between which it acts is one of the fundamental tenets of nuclear structure. This assumption ...

Far from the everyday world occupied by such common elements such as gold and lead lies a little-understood realm inhabited by radioactive, or unstable, elements. Recently, a nuclear physicists ...

The nucleus is very small compared to the atom as a whole: as electrons are even smaller, most of an atom is empty space the diameter of a nucleus can be 100,000 times less than the diameter of an ...

Isotope factory: The Radioactive Isotope Beam Factory (RIBF) at RIKEN in Wako, Japan, provided the ion beam used to create the first oxygen-28 atoms. (Courtesy: RIKEN) Scientists in Japan have become ...