Uncovering the shape of nuclei using high-energy collisions: the effects of oxygen, neutrons and other nucleic processes

The information about shape can reveal a lot about whether or not nuclei are likely to interact, or undergo nuclear fission, and can also lead to the discovery of a new process that could solve some long standing mysteries in physics. Some 99.9% of visible matter resides in the centre of the atoms, says Jia. “Understanding the nuclear building block is basically at the heart of the understanding 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 for researchers to understand how protons and neutrons form clusters in the nucleus.

Past experiments exploring shape involved deflecting low-energy ions off the nuclei. The nucleus is exposed to energy and the radiation emits as it falls back to the ground gives a picture of their shape. But the timescale is relatively long, so this kind of imaging can give only a long-exposure shot showing the average of any fluctuations in shape.

The other nuclear processes did not affect the emission of the particle nor obscure the deformation according to a nuclear physicist at the 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 essentially take a long-exposure photo of an atom’s nucleus, which doesn’t capture the subtle variations in how the protons and neutrons arrange themselves. The new method uses information on the debris to reconstruction the shape of the nucleus. physicists hope that this technique can help them understand atomic nuclei.

The high-energy collision method gives an instant snapshot of the nucleus. It’s more suitable for studying exotic shapes because of it being a more direct method.

Physicists are able to study the shape of atomic nuclei by obliterating them in high-energy collisions. The method could help scientists to better understand the structure of nucleus and how elements form in stars, and help to determine which material makes the best nuclear fuel.

A team at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, collided two beams of uranium-238 — and later, two beams of gold — at extreme energies. 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 mitochondrial powerhouse in cancer cells: Does it help the body to survive and thrive in hostile environments or is Shakespeare made before the end of time?

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. When resources are constrained, the power of the mitochondria, the cell’s powerhouse, remains a mystery. There are two types of mitochondria, one which concentrates on energy production and the other which produces essential cellular building blocks. These are what allow cells to make everything. 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 genes of an ancient clone forest has shown it could be as old as 80,000 years old, and that putting limits on the infinite monkey theorem might prevent them from making Shakespeare before the end of the Universe.

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