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 ...

An unexpected deformation has been discovered in the helium-8 nucleus by an international team led by Matthias Holl and Rituparna Kanungo, both at Saint Mary’s University in Canada. The researchers ...

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 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.

THE successful manner in which the single-particle model of the atomic nucleus has accounted for many nuclear properties is well known to those who follow developments in nuclear physics. This model, ...