For decades, nuclear physicists believed that "Islands of Inversion"—regions where the normal rules of nuclear structure suddenly break down—were found mostly in neutron-rich isotopes. In these ...

Some atoms are stable, while others seem to fall apart. Lead-208 will probably last forever, while the synthetic isotope technetium-99 exists for just hours. The difference lies in the structure of ...

Maria Goeppert Mayer was a physicist at Argonne who developed the nuclear shell model theory, a pivotal discovery that won her a Nobel Prize in 1963. This year marks the 75 th anniversary of the ...

Abstract: Nuclear science fundamentally explores the formation of protons and neutrons from elementary particles and the interactions between them. One successful model describing this is the nuclear ...