Probing nobelium with laser light

Sizes and shapes of nuclei with more than 100 protons were so far experimentally inaccessible. Laser spectroscopy is an established technique in measuring fundamental properties of exotic atoms and their nuclei. For the first ...

The chances of detecting clumps in atomic nuclei are growing

What do atomic nuclei really look like? Are the protons and neutrons they contain distributed chaotically? Or do they perhaps bind into alpha clusters, that is, clumps made up of two protons and two neutrons? In the case ...

En route to the optical nuclear clock

The nucleus of thorium-229 possesses a property that is unique among all known nuclides: It should be possible to excite it with ultraviolet light. To date, little has been known about the low-energy state of the Th-229 nucleus ...

Solution to the hyperfine puzzle in reach

Last year, physicists at TU Darmstadt cast doubt on our current understanding of the interplay between electrons and atomic nuclei, and are now upping the ante by proposing a solution to this so-called "hyperfine puzzle." ...

Researchers report the creation of Rydberg polarons in a Bose gas

What is inside an atom between the nucleus and the electron? Usually there is nothing, but why could there not be other particles too? If the electron orbits the nucleus at a great distance, there is plenty of space in between ...

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