For the first time, physicists have developed a model that explains the origins of unusually stable magic nuclei based ...

Image of the emission of 4 neutrons (blue spheres) from the exotic nucleus oxygen-28, which consists of 8 protons (red spheres) and 20 neutrons. According to the traditional model, the nucleons inside ...

Benjamin Mottelson was a US-born physicist who specialized in theoretical work on the structure of the atomic nucleus. During the 1950s, in close collaboration with his Danish colleague Aage Bohr, ...

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 ...

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 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.