Surrey physicists study fast decay of doubly magic tin nuclei
Friday 22 June 2012
Nuclear physicists in the Department, together with partners in Edinburgh and international collaborators, have just published a paper in the prestigious journal Nature. This presents results on Tin-100, an isotope of tin with 50 protons and 50 neutrons. They showed that the tin converts to indium via an unusually rapid transformation of a proton to a neutron.
Nuclear physicists in the Department, led by Dr Zsolt Podolyak and Prof Paddy Regan, studied this exotic nucleus as part of an international team of scientists. Tin-100 is the heaviest nucleus yet studied with equal numbers of protons and neutrons, and so its study helps understand the structure and of the nuclei at the heart of atoms, and how these nuclei react both in reactors and in starts and supernovae.
The Nature paper is here, and the University's press release is here.