Potassium nucleus loses some of its magic
ISOLDE spokesperson Gerda Neyens at the facility’s collinear resonance ionisation spectroscopy (CRIS) set-up. (Image: CERN) The magic seems to be ebbing away from some atomic nuclei. The latest measurements of the sizes of potassium nuclei rich in neutrons show no signature of a “magic” number of neutrons in potassium-51, which has 19 protons and 32 neutrons. The result, obtained by a team of researchers using CERN’s nuclear-physics facility ISOLDE and described in a paper just published in Nature Physics, challenges nuclear-physics theories and the proposed magi...
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