An experiment carried out at CERN's ISOLDE facility has determined the western shore of a small island of atomic nuclei, ...

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 ...

Researchers at CERN have made a great step forward in revealing how atomic nuclei behave after they mapped the edge of a ...

For surfers, it's not enough just to wait for the right wave: they still have to know how to catch it. As it turns out, one challenge faced by surfers also applies to protons. An experiment recently ...

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 ...

The atomic nucleus was discovered over a century ago ... the way in which these particles pack themselves together within it. In the classic nuclear shell model, protons and neutrons arrange ...

Physicists have found evidence of a new “magic number” of neutrons in an unstable isotope of calcium. Using the Radioactive Ion Beam Factory at RIKEN in Japan, they have isolated calcium nuclei ...

When Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize in physics this year, she was the first woman to receive the honor in 55 years. The previous female winner, Maria Goeppert Mayer, was in 1963, for proposing ...

In human cells, there are about 20,000 genes on a two-meter DNA strand—finely coiled up in a nucleus about 10 micrometers in ...