Skip to main content

Party Pairs

 


Atoms in a gas can seem like partiers at a nanoscopic rave, with particles zipping around, pairing up, and flying off again in a seemingly random fashion. And yet physicists have come up with formulas that predict this behavior, even when the atoms are extremely close together and can tug and pull on each other in complicated ways.

The environment within the nucleus of a single atom seems similar, with protons and neutrons also dancing about. But because the nucleus is such a compact space, scientists have struggled to pin down the behavior of these particles, known as nucleons, in an atom’s nucleus. Models that describe the interactions of nucleons that are far apart broken down when the particles pair up and interact at close range.

Now an MIT-led team has simulated the behavior of protons and neutrons in several types of atomic nuclei, using some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The team explored a wide range of nuclear interaction models and found, surprisingly, that the formulas describing how atoms behave in a gas can be generalized to predict how protons and neutrons interact at close range in the nucleus.

When nucleons are less than 1 femtometer — 1 quadrillionth of a meter — apart, the researchers found another surprise: The particles pair up in the same way, regardless of whether they inhabit a small nucleus like helium or a more crowded one like calcium.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Next Best Thing to Jezero Crater This Side of Mars

You may not be able to travel to Jezero Crater on  , but you can visit the next best thing: Lake Salda, Turkey. Researchers are using their understanding of Lake Salda to help guide the Mars 2020 mission, which will drop the Perseverance rover into the crater to search for signs of ancient life. “One of the great things about visiting Lake Salda is it really gives you a sense of what it would have been like to stand on the shores of ancient Lake Jezero,” said Briony Horgan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University and member of the Perseverance science team. “Carbonates are important because they are really good at trapping anything that existed within that environment, such as microbes, organics, or certain textures that provide evidence of past microbial life,” said Brad Garczynski, a graduate student at Purdue who works with Horgan. “But before we go to Jezero, it is really important to gain context on how these carbonates form on Earth in order to focus our search for signs f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Flat Lens a Thousand Times Thinner Than a Human Hair

The lens can be used to produce high-resolution images with a wide field of view. It can serve as a camera lens in smartphones and can be used in other devices that depend on sensors (high-resolution wide-angle selfie obtained using metalens. A lens that is a thousand times thinner than a human hair has been developed in Brazil by researchers at the University of São Paulo’s São Carlos School of Engineering (EESC-USP). It can serve as a camera lens in smartphones or be used in other devices that depend on sensors.  “In the present technological context, its applications are almost unlimited,” Emiliano Rezende Martins, a professor in EESC-USP’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computing and last author of a published paper on the invention, told Agência FAPESP. The paper is entitled “On Metalenses with Arbitrarily Wide Field of View” and is published in ACS Photonics. The study was supported by FAPESP via a scholarship for a research internship abroad awarded to Augusto Mart...
Post a Comment
Read more