Physicists have found a new “island of inversion” in the nucleus of molybdenum-84, a perfectly balanced atom with equal ...

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 ...

For the first time, physicists have developed a model that explains the origins of unusually stable magic nuclei based directly on the interactions between their protons and neutrons. Published in ...