Physicists Maria Goeppert Mayer and J. Hans D. Jensen develop a theory of the nucleus as composed of shells of protons and neutrons. It explains why nuclei with certain “magic numbers” of protons and ...

Since the atomic nucleus was first proposed in 1911, physicists simply assumed it was round. But are the nuclei of atoms really round? Intuitively this shape makes sense and physicists believed it ...

Part of Physics (Single Science) Unit 1: Atomic and nuclear physics Most of the mass and all of the positive charge of an atom is in the nucleus. Most of an atom is empty space, (a vacuum). In 1897, ...

The inclusion of the long-neglected tensor force into theoretical models revises our understanding of ‘magic numbers’ in the atomic nucleus The world of nuclear physics is a relatively ordered one.

Maria Goeppert Mayer was a physicist at Argonne who developed the nuclear shell model theory, a pivotal discovery that won her a Nobel Prize in 1963. This year marks the 75 th anniversary of the ...