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 ...

An unexpected deformation has been discovered in the helium-8 nucleus by an international team led by Matthias Holl and Rituparna Kanungo, both at Saint Mary’s University in Canada. The researchers ...

Individual protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei turn out not to behave according to the predictions made by existing theoretical models. This surprising conclusion, reached by an international team ...

Image of the emission of 4 neutrons (blue spheres) from the exotic nucleus oxygen-28, which consists of 8 protons (red spheres) and 20 neutrons. According to the traditional model, the nucleons inside ...