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First Observations of Short-lived Pear-shaped Atomic Nuclei
An anonymous reader sends this quote from a press release at CERN:
"An international team at the ISOLDE radioactive-beam facility at CERN has shown that some atomic nuclei can assume asymmetric, 'pear' shapes (abstract). The observations contradict some existing nuclear theories and will require others to be amended. ... Most nuclei have the shape of a rugby ball. While state-of-the-art theories are able to predict this behaviour, the same theories have predicted that for some particular combinations of protons and neutrons, nuclei can also assume asymmetric shapes, like a pear. In this case there is more mass at one end of the nucleus than the other."
Not to mention the "poor self esteem" and "great personality" protons
It must have gotten married.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
Not to mention the "poor self esteem" and "great personality" protons
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I'd rather not discuss my atomic weight.
Talk about a sig that sort of fits in with the convo...
Be seeing you...
Reminds me of the Gary Larson cartoon set in a haywire factory.
"Professor, the beam has gone out of alignment, the atom chamber is leaking and the datalogger has crashed again. I'm afraid the whole experiment has gone you-know-what."
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
For those interested: Nuclei with shapes like this or barbells are significant in solving the problem of filling that range of elements on the Periodic table that were skipped. Ideas were proposed that nuclei would need to have these shapes in order to be stable if the nucleus followed a shell model similar to electron shells. You can read more by researching "Island of Stability"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability
The image of Ra (Radium) shown is interesting, given that this atom is radioactive...i.e. unstable. With spheres being more stable than wobbly shapes, it seems to make sense that radioactive elements might vary well have asymmetric shapes at the atomic level.
I come here for the love
Subject line fail.
I come here for the love
that this nuclei is just more excited than the others!
Which is why I' really like some details about the experimental settings/procedure.
The paper's title is "Studies of pear-shaped nuclei using accelerated radioactive beams": is it possible the pear-shape is actually caused by the acceleration?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Heard in the lab: "Dammit, that neutron went straight to my ass!"
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Some of us are Americans you insensitive clod.
The acceleration referred to in the title does not have an effect on that, as it refers to the beam being accelerated before measurements are made (a long time before on the nuclear reaction time scales). The method of smacking nuclei together to excite them then measure the gamma rays produced by the relaxation of the excited nuclei is pretty standard. Although typically it used to be beam of accelerated stable isotopes hitting a radioactive target, and now they are instead accelerating the radioactive isotopes and hitting a stable stationary target. This doesn't have an effect on the reaction/excitation, but instead allows them to use less of the radioactive isotopes for the same amount of reactions, compared to having a large radioactive target most of which is not hit by nuclei in the beam. And obviously the collisions have an effect on the nuclei as that excitation is exactly what they are studying, although in ways that will average over nuclei to prevent random single nuclei effects from affecting the result.
"...and that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana shaped."
The real implication is that it's OK for guys to bang every chick in sight, but that women that do so are sluts sleeping their way to the top.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
There's an evolutionary reason for racism too, but we've made much better progress on that front.
Dr. Stoyan Sarg already predicted such atomic nuclei shape in his "Basic Structures of Matter - Supergravitation Unified Theory":
http://www.sbwire.com/press-releases/ground-breaking-new-book-offers-scientific-reasoning-for-cold-fusion-energy-248341.htm
BTW here is a better article from Physics World:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/may/08/nuclear-physics-goes-pear-shaped