{"id":233287,"date":"2026-03-14T05:17:01","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T10:17:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/physicists-observe-rare-nuclear-isomer-in-ytterbium-150-for-first-time"},"modified":"2026-03-14T05:17:01","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T10:17:01","slug":"physicists-observe-rare-nuclear-isomer-in-ytterbium-150-for-first-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/physicists-observe-rare-nuclear-isomer-in-ytterbium-150-for-first-time","title":{"rendered":"Physicists observe rare nuclear isomer in ytterbium-150 for first time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/physicists-observe-rare-nuclear-isomer-in-ytterbium-150-for-first-time.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Nuclear isomers are crucial probes for studying the structure of nuclei. Unlike chemical isomers\u2014which have the same chemical formula but different arrangements of atoms\u2014nuclear isomers are nuclei that exist in a long-lived and relatively stable excited state.<\/p>\n<p>Normally, an atomic nucleus resides in its lowest-energy state, known as the ground state. Under external perturbations, such as nucleus-nucleus collisions, however, a nucleus can be excited to a higher-energy state.<\/p>\n<p>While most excited nuclear states are extremely short-lived and rapidly decay back to the ground state, some nuclei remain \u201ctrapped\u201d in an excited state for a remarkably long time. Such isomeric states help reveal the structure of the nucleus due to its high sensitivity to the underlying shell structure as well as to changes in single-particle levels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nuclear isomers are crucial probes for studying the structure of nuclei. Unlike chemical isomers\u2014which have the same chemical formula but different arrangements of atoms\u2014nuclear isomers are nuclei that exist in a long-lived and relatively stable excited state. Normally, an atomic nucleus resides in its lowest-energy state, known as the ground state. Under external perturbations, such [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,873,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-nuclear-energy","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233287","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\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}