Matt Reed and Ian Cullen discover new states of the hafnium and tantalum nuclei

Thursday 21 October 2010

A team of scientists including Surrey PhD students, Matt Reed, Ian Cullen, Ryan Kempley and Tom Swan, a post-doctoral fellow, Ajay Deo, and Surrey academic, Phil Walker, have discovered new long-lived states of the nucleus in the rare metals hafnium and tantalum. These states are called isomers and the isomers found my Matt and Ian live for up to several minutes. For nuclear states this is an eternity, many nuclear states decay in a nanosecond (less than on tenth of one billionth of a minute) so these new isomers are exceptional.

The work has just been published in the physics journal "Physical Review Letters". A brief description of the paper is here. Physical Review Letters publishes short papers in physics that are of exceptional importance. It is the most prestigious journal in physics.