Imaging the shapes of atomic nuclei by obliterating them in high-energy collisions: The effects of electron emission on nucleus shape

The chance of detecting a process called double decay, which can help solve long-standing mysteries in physics, is boosted by information about shape. Some 99.9% of visible matter resides in the centre of the atoms, says Jia. The understanding of the nuclear block is at the center of who we are.

The method would be applied to study the differences between oxygen and neon. Oxygen nuclei are nearly spherical, whereas neon nuclei — which carry an extra two protons and two neutrons — are thought to bulge out. It is possible to understand how protons and neutrons form clusters in the nucleus by comparing their shapes.

This kind of imaging could help with the challenging task of distinguishing between nuclei that are ‘rigid’, with well-defined shapes, and ‘soft’ fluctuating ones, says Zielińska.

“I find it fascinating that it worked” and that other nuclear processes did not influence the particle emission and obscure the deformation, says Magdalena Zielińska, a nuclear physicist at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission near Paris.

Physicists have revealed a new technique to image the shape of atomic nuclei — by smashing them together. The nucleus of an atom doesn’t really resemble what is shown in textbooks — they actually come in a variety of shapes, which drive an element’s behaviour. Current methods take a long-exposure photo of the atom, which doesn’t capture the subtle variations in how the protons and neutrons arrange themselves. The new method uses information from the debris to reconstruct the nucleus’s shape. The researchers hope that this technique can help physicists resolve many more mysteries about atomic nuclei.

By contrast, the high-energy collision method gives an instant snapshot of nuclei during impact. It is more suitable for studying exotic shapes as it is a more direct method.

Physicists have found a new way to study the shape of atomic nuclei — by obliterating them in high-energy collisions. The method could assist scientists in better understanding the shape of nucleus’s, which could influence the rate at which elements form in stars and which materials make the best nuclear fuel.

At extreme energies, two beams of gold and two beams of Uranium-238 came together at the RHIC. They hit them “so hard that we basically melted the nuclei into a soup”, says co-author Jiangyong Jia, a physicist at Stony Brook University in New York.

The Nature Podcast: Cellular powerhouses for survival and survival of cancer cells in nutrient-poor environments, and an ancient clone forest

Researchers have uncovered that mitochondria divide into two distinct forms when cells are starved, a finding that could help explain how some cancers thrive in hostile conditions. Mitochondria are the cellular powerhouses, making energy and vital metabolic molecules, but how they are able to do this when resources are limited has been a mystery. It turns out that in nutrient-poor situations, mitochondria split into two separate types, one of which concentrates on energy production, the other on producing essential cellular building blocks. Cells can make everything they need. The team showed that this also happens in certain cancer cells, which might help them to survive and grow under hostile conditions in the body.

Analysing the genome of an ancient clone forest has revealed it could be up to 80,000 years old, and how putting limits on the famous infinite monkey theorem means they probably wouldn’t churn out Shakespeare before the end of the Universe.

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