As humanity continues to investigate the subatomic world, our understanding of details of the nature of atoms and atomic nuclei grows. For generations, scientists have been trying to understand the ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

For the first time, physicists have developed a model that explains the origins of unusually stable magic nuclei based directly on the interactions between their protons and neutrons. Published in ...

Nuclear clocks could allow scientists to probe the fundamental forces of the universe in the future. Researchers have made a crucial advance in this area as part of an international collaboration.

The time is nigh for nuclear clocks. In a first, scientists have used a tabletop laser to bump an atomic nucleus into a higher energy state. It’s a feat that sets scientists on a path toward creating ...

I read with great interest the article by Katherine Bourzac “Divining the Mysteries of the Atomic Nucleus” in the Jan. 29, 2024, issue of C&EN (page 30). Curious readers might like to know that an ...

Physicists have found a new way to study the shape of atomic nuclei — by obliterating them in high-energy collisions. The method could help scientists to better understand nuclei’s shapes, which, for ...

Scientists at Delft University of Technology have managed to watch a single atomic nucleus flip its magnetic state in real time. Using a scanning tunneling microscope, they indirectly read the nucleus ...

When world-leading teams join forces, new findings are bound to be made. This is what happened when quantum physicists from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) and the Max Planck Institute ...

Smashing uranium-238 ions together proves to be a reliable way of imaging their nuclei. High-energy collision experiments reveal nuclear shapes that are strongly elongated and have no symmetry around ...

When most of us picture an atom, we think about a small nucleus made of protons and neutrons orbited by one or more electrons. We view these electrons as point-like while rapidly orbiting the nucleus.

Atomic bombs hastened the end of World War II. But they launched another kind of war, a cold one, that threatened the entire planet with nuclear annihilation. So it’s understandable that on the 75th ...