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Mirror symmetry broken for nuclear ground states

The principle of mirror symmetry, which states that nuclear structure remains the same when protons are swapped for neutrons and vice versa, has been found to be broken in the lowest-energy forms of a mirror pair of nuclei.
  1. Bertram Blank

    1. Bertram Blank is at the Centre d’Etudes Nucléaires de Bordeaux-Gradignan, 33175 Gradignan Cedex, France.

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Nature likes symmetry. Examples range across size scales from macroscopic objects, such as spiderwebs or honeycombs, to the microscopic world with its arrangement of atoms in molecules, or of electrons around an atomic nucleus. Symmetry also exists at the level of nuclei, but in a paper in Nature, Hoff et al.1 report one way of breaking it.

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Nature 580, 37-38 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00898-5

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