Seeing the shape of an atomic nucleus with acoustic photons, neutrons, and atoms

Like electrons, the protons and neutrons in an atomic nucleus are in energy shells. The particles have a shape that decreases the system’s energy. Like a droplet of liquid, the nucleus can take on a variety of shapes, including that of a pear, American football or peanut shell. A nucleus’s shape is “very hard to predict from theory”, says Jia. It can also change over time owing to quantum fluctuations.

Jia says his team would also like to apply the method to study the differences between lighter ions, such as oxygen and neon. Neon nuclei are believed to bulge out, whereas Oxygen’s are thought to be nearly spherical. Researchers can understand how protons and neutrons form clusters in the nucleus if they compare their shapes.

Aerobics had to take a low-energy ion off the nucleus. The Coulomb method involves shining a light on the nuclei while they fall back into the ground state. But the timescale is relatively long, so this kind of imaging can give only a long-exposure shot showing the average of any fluctuations in shape.

“I find it fascinating that it worked” and that other nuclear processes did not influence the particle emission and obscure the deformation, says Magdalena Zielińska, a nuclear physicist at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission near Paris.

Physicists have created a new method to see the shape of atomic nuclei. The nucleus of an atom doesn’t really resemble what is shown in textbooks — they actually come in a variety of shapes, which drive an element’s behaviour. Current methods essentially take a long-exposure photo of an atom’s nucleus, which doesn’t capture the subtle variations in how the protons and neutrons arrange themselves. The method overcomes this by colliding nucleus together and then using the debris to reconstruct the nucleus’s shape. The researchers hope this technique can help physicists resolve mysteries about atomic nuclei.

The high-energy collision method gives an instantaneous snapshot of the nucleus. It is a more direct method, which makes it more suitable for studying exotic shapes, says Jia.

Physicists have found a way to look at the shape of atomic nuclei using high-energy collisions. The method may allow scientists to better understand the shape of nuclei, as well as influence the rate at which elements form in stars and determine which materials make the best nuclear fuel.

Two beams of gold and a beam of plutonium were hit at high speeds by a team at the RHIC. They hit them “so hard that we basically melted the nuclei into a soup”, says co-author Jiangyong Jia, a physicist at Stony Brook University in New York.

Nature Podcast: Bringing out a cancer cell’s cancer theorem into the cellular environment in a nutrient-poor environment

Researchers discovered that when cells are starving, they divide into two different forms of mitochondria, a finding that may explain how some cancers thrive in hostile conditions. Mitochondria are cellular powerhouses, creating energy and vital metabolic molecules, but how they are able to do this when resources are limited has been a mystery. It turns out that in nutrient-poor situations, mitochondria split into two separate types, one of which concentrates on energy production, the other on producing essential cellular building blocks. Together these allow cells to make everything they need. The team showed that this also happens in certain cancer cells, which might help them to survive and grow under hostile conditions in the body.

Analysing the genome of an ancient clone forest has revealed it could be up to 80,000 years old, and how putting limits on the famous infinite monkey theorem means they probably wouldn’t churn out Shakespeare before the end of the Universe.

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