The effect of the doubly magic structure of the oxygen nucleus can also be studied in the CERN LHC particle accelerators.
Oxygen-oxygen collisions at the Large Hadron Collider provide an opportunity to further study the doubly magic oxygen nucleus. This opportunity has been seized by researchers at the HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics.
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Magical Oxygen Nucleus The properties of elements exhibit a repeating pattern because electron shells in atoms build up in a specific order. This principle enabled the organization of elements into the periodic table. The noble gases, found in the outermost column, are particularly stable as their electron shells are completely filled. Similarly, the properties of atomic nuclei also change periodically. The protons and neutrons that make up the nucleus are arranged in shells as well. According to the nuclear shell model, fully filled nuclear shells make the nucleus especially stable and less prone to decay or fission. Such nuclei are called magic nuclei, as their proton or neutron number corresponds to a specific so-called magic number (2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, 126). |
The stability of magic nuclei is important for various practical applications, such as the selection of medical isotopes and nuclear energy research, where energy from nuclear decay can be harnessed. Dubbed doubly magic, the oxygen nucleus is particularly interesting: the most common oxygen isotope, with a mass number of 16, contains 8 protons and 8 neutrons, each of which is a magic number. This closed-shell structure provides the nucleus with exceptional stability.
Gergely Gábor Barnaföldi, senior researcher at the HUN-REN Wigner RCP, in collaboration with young researchers and colleagues from the Indian Institutes of Technology, investigated whether the effects of this magical initial state could be observed in the ultra-relativistic energy collisions of oxygen nuclei planned at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The two types of nuclear structure models: the upper one, without structure, shows the Wood-Saxon distribution, while the lower panel displays the nuclear distribution with a tetrahedral structure, representing the cluster.
The researchers examined two models to study elliptic flow (v2), which measures one of the signatures of quark-gluon plasma, and characteristic quantities associated with triple correlations (v3). They arrived at a surprising conclusion: the discrepancies between the two nuclear structure models are so significant that their effects should be measurable in the oxygen-oxygen collisions at the LHC. Their findings have been published in the journal Physics Letters B.
