{"id":169814,"date":"2023-08-16T17:23:45","date_gmt":"2023-08-16T22:23:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/long-lived-quantum-state-points-the-way-to-solving-a-mystery-in-radioactive-nuclei"},"modified":"2023-08-16T17:23:45","modified_gmt":"2023-08-16T22:23:45","slug":"long-lived-quantum-state-points-the-way-to-solving-a-mystery-in-radioactive-nuclei","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/long-lived-quantum-state-points-the-way-to-solving-a-mystery-in-radioactive-nuclei","title":{"rendered":"Long-lived quantum state points the way to solving a mystery in radioactive nuclei"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/long-lived-quantum-state-points-the-way-to-solving-a-mystery-in-radioactive-nuclei2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Timothy Gray of the Department of Energy\u2019s Oak Ridge National Laboratory led a study that may have revealed an unexpected change in the shape of an atomic nucleus. The surprise finding could affect our understanding of what holds nuclei together, how protons and neutrons interact and how elements form.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe used radioactive beams of excited sodium-32 nuclei to test our understanding of nuclear shapes far from stability and found an unexpected result that raises questions about how nuclear shapes evolve,\u201d said Gray, a nuclear physicist. The results are published in Physical Review Letters.<\/p>\n<p>The shapes and energies of atomic nuclei can shift over time between different configurations. Typically, nuclei live as quantum entities that have either spherical or deformed shapes. The former look like basketballs, and the latter resemble American footballs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Timothy Gray of the Department of Energy\u2019s Oak Ridge National Laboratory led a study that may have revealed an unexpected change in the shape of an atomic nucleus. The surprise finding could affect our understanding of what holds nuclei together, how protons and neutrons interact and how elements form. \u201cWe used radioactive beams of excited [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169814\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}