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Nuclear physics

Doubly magical gamma decays

Nature volume 390, pages 121–122 (1997)Cite this article

The harmony of the periodic table in chemistry is a manifestation of the underlying quantum shell structure of the atom. Noble-gas elements with full electron shells are unreactive and have high ionization energies. The chemical properties of other elements can be understood in relation to these closed shells, whose location is solely defined by the atomic number Z, the total charge of the atomic nucleus. Similarly, the nucleus can be modelled in terms of neutron and proton shells, closed-shell nuclei having ‘magic numbers’ of neutrons or protons. But the presence of two varieties of particle leads to more richness and complexity in nuclei than in atoms. This can produce surprises, such as the one that Górska et al.1 have now found in cadmium-98, a relation of the doubly magic nucleus, tin-100.

The first evidence for nuclear shell structure came from measurements of the masses of stable isotopes, and their natural abundances. It was found that nuclei with certain neutron (N) and proton (Z) numbers are abundant, and have high binding energies — they are very stable, in other words. Modern experiments are able to probe shell structures of nuclei very far from stability. Particularly revealing information can be obtained in studies of gamma-ray emission from excited states of nuclei at or near shell closures. Such states should have simple configurations that can be readily interpreted in terms of excitations with respect to a stable core. In general, one expects nuclei with closed neutron or proton shells to have high-lying excited states compared with the ground state, because particles must be promoted across a major shell gap to be excited.

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Figure 1: The neutron and proton shell occupancies of 102Sn and 98Cd in relation to a core of 100Sn, an unstable but.

References

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  1. the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK

    Philip Woods

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Woods, P. Doubly magical gamma decays. Nature 390, 121–122 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/36455

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