The study is based on experiments at Japan's Radioactive Isotope Beam Factory (RIBF), which is located at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science in Wako, Japan. Such a fundamental understanding can inform theories about explosive processes such as the creation of heavy elements in star mergers and explosions, he said.
"One of the major goals of the nuclear physics field is to understand the structure from the nucleus of an element all the way to the drip line." "The interesting question in our minds all along, when you get so close to the drip line, is: 'Does the way that the neutrons and protons arrange themselves change?'" said Paul Fallon, a senior scientist in Berkeley Lab's Nuclear Science Division and a co-author of the study. The shape and structure of nuclei near the drip line is particularly interesting to nuclear physicists because it can teach them fundamental things about how nuclei behave at the extremes of existence. This is one of the heaviest isotopes that you can currently reach experimentally near the drip line." "It's not known if Mg-40 is at the drip line, but it's surely very close. "It's extremely neutron-rich," Crawford said. For a given element, the maximum number of neutrons in a nucleus is referred to as the "neutron drip line" - if you try to add another neutron when it is already at capacity, the extra neutron will immediately "drip" out of the nucleus. The magnesium-40 (Mg-40) isotope that the researchers studied has 28 neutrons, which may be the maximum for magnesium atoms. The most common and stable type of magnesium atom found in nature has 12 protons, 12 neutrons, and 12 electrons (which have a negative charge).Ītoms of the same element with different neutron counts are known as isotopes. While the number of protons (which have a positive electric charge) in its atomic nucleus defines an element's atomic number - where it sits on the periodic table - the number of neutrons (which have no electric charge) can differ. 7 in the Physical Review Letters journal. "Magnesium-40 sits at an intersection where there are a lot of questions about what it really looks like," said Heather Crawford, a staff scientist in the Nuclear Science Division at Berkeley Lab and lead author of this study, published online Feb.
Now, an international team led by scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has reproduced this exotic system, known as magnesium-40, and gleaned new and surprising clues about its nuclear structure.
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