Certain isotopes such as Indium-115 (In-115) are extremely long lived, taking over 100 trillion years for half of the Indium atoms to decay away. These isotopes allow scientists to probe the precise internal processes that ...
Studying radioactive materials is very difficult due to the potential health risks they pose to scientists. Expense is also a major barrier, with some radioisotopes costing more than $10,000 per microgram (or $10 billion ...
Understanding the behavior of nuclear matter—including the quarks and gluons that make up the protons and neutrons of atomic nuclei—is extremely complicated. This is particularly true in our world, which is three dimensional. ...
Outside atomic nuclei, neutrons are unstable particles, with a lifetime of about fifteen minutes. The neutron disintegrates due to the weak nuclear force, leaving behind a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino. The weak ...
The building blocks of atomic nuclei are protons and neutrons, which are themselves made of even more fundamental particles: quarks and gluons. These particles interact via the strong force, one of the four fundamental forces ...
The thorium isotope with the mass number 229 (229Th) is highly exciting in many respects—for fundamental physics as well as for future applications, for example in the sense of a nuclear clock.
To produce commercial energy, future fusion power plants will need to achieve temperatures of 100 million degrees C. To do so requires careful control of the plasma. In a study published in the journal Nuclear Fusion, researchers ...
Atomic clocks are the world's most precise timekeepers. Based on periodic transitions between two electronic states of an atom, they can track the passage of time with a precision as high as one part in a quintillion, meaning ...
Better understanding the formation of swirling, ring-shaped disturbances—known as vortex rings—could help nuclear fusion researchers compress fuel more efficiently, bringing it closer to becoming a viable energy source.
Consumers paid high energy costs while electricity generators saw enormous increases in revenues beyond their costs, finds a new report by UCL researchers that traces the revenues of the UK's electricity generation sector ...
