Physicists have found a new “island of inversion” in the nucleus of molybdenum-84, a perfectly balanced atom with equal numbers of protons and neutrons. The discovery upends a decades-old assumption ...

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 ...

The inclusion of the long-neglected tensor force into theoretical models revises our understanding of ‘magic numbers’ in the atomic nucleus The world of nuclear physics is a relatively ordered one.