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 ...

The word magic is not often used in the context of science. But in the early 1930s, scientists discovered that some atomic nuclei—the center part of atoms, which make up all matter—were more stable ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...