For three months in 2019, physicists blasted a beam of electrons at lead atoms that were held in place by foil made of diamond. The team was trying to determine the thickness of the neutron skin, the ...

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

Some atomic nuclei are thin-skinned — they’re surrounded by a slim shell of neutrons. Physicists now know how thick that neutron skin is for one particular type of nucleus. The skin of lead-208 — a ...

Physicists have discovered a surprising new “Island of Inversion” in a place no one expected: among nuclei where the number of protons equals the number of neutrons. For decades, these strange regions ...

Physicists working with molybdenum-84, a nucleus containing exactly 42 protons and 42 neutrons, have found that this ...

Physicists have measured the “skin” of an atom for the first time and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is extremely thin. The measurement may help us understand the properties of neutron stars. Lead-208, ...

Apart from flashbacks that the hit Netflix series Breaking Bad may have conjured up, most of us have likely happily forgotten what we learned in chemistry classes back in school. So here’s a quick ...