Since the atomic nucleus was first proposed in 1911, physicists simply assumed it was round. But are the nuclei of atoms really round? Intuitively this shape makes sense and physicists believed it ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

Some atoms are stable, while others seem to fall apart. Lead-208 will probably last forever, while the synthetic isotope technetium-99 exists for just hours. The difference lies in the structure of ...