For nearly 50 years, physicists have dreamed of the secrets they could unlock by raising the energy state of an atom's nucleus using a laser. The achievement would allow today's atomic clocks to be ...

A team of physicists say they have created the first coherent picture of atomic nuclei from their composite particles, quarks and gluons. The 20th century was a pretty busy hundred years for particle ...

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 ...

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 ...

The isotope lead-208 was predicted to be extremely stable and perfectly spherical because of the “magic” numbers of electrons and protons orbiting its nucleus. When researchers blasted lead-208 with ...

This image depicts the radium atom’s pear-shaped nucleus of protons and neutrons in the center, surrounded by a cloud of electrons (yellow), and an electron (yellow ball with arrow) that has a ...

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 ...

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers has observed an elliptical galaxy known as ...