Although most of the nuclei of atoms are spherical, there are "figures" most non-conformist - for example pear-shaped. The discovery could have important implications in clarifying some of the mysteries of physics and the cosmos.
It is suspected for some time that nucleus such forms may exist, but now, an international team of physicists has succeeded in demonstrating that.
The discovery could fuel efforts discovery of a new fundamental forces in nature, which could explain why the Big Bang gave birth matter and antimatter in proproţii uneven - more matter than antimatter. This imbalance plays a major role in the history of the universe.
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| Big Bang Confirmed Again, This Time By The Universe's First photo: Atoms Forbes |
As explained by one of the researchers involved, Tim Chupp, University of Michigan, where the Big Bang when matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts they would have annihilated each other and nothing would have been - no stars, no planets, no life.
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| Timothy Chupp College of Literature, Science, and the Arts University of Michigan |
Particles of antimatter have the same mass but opposite electrical charge to the particles of matter. Antimatter is rare in the universe, appearing only for fractions of a second solar flares and cosmic radiation in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.
When particles of matter antimatter particles meet, they annihilate each other.
What causes this imbalance between matter and antimatter is one of the great mysteries of physics. The phenomenon is not predicted by the Standard Model - the theory that describes the complex nature of matter and the laws that govern it.
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| Large Hadron Collider restarts after two years photo: University of Cambridge |
The Standard Model describes four fundamental forces (or interactions) governing the matter to behavior: gravity, electromagnetic force, strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force.
Physicists are currently looking for a new force or interaction to explain the imbalance between matter and antimatter.
Evidence of such interactions could be obtained from measurements of the axis nuclei of radioactive elements such as radium and radon.
Researchers have confirmed that the nuclei of these atoms are pear-shaped nuclei unlike most "typical" spherical or oval.
The nucleus is the very dense region consisting of protons and neutrons at the center of an atom. It was discovered in 1911, as a result of Ernest Rutherford's interpretation of the famous 1909 Rutherford experiment performed by cr and Ernest Marsden, under the direction of Rutherford.
The proton–neutron model of nucleus was proposed by Dmitry Ivanenko in 1932.Almost all of the mass of an atom is located in the nucleus, with a very small contribution from the orbiting electrons. The diameter of the nucleus is in the range of 1.75(1.75×10−15 m) for hydrogen (the diameter of a single proton)to about 15 fm for the heaviest atoms, such as uranium.
These dimensions are much smaller than the diameter of the atom itself (nucleus + electron cloud), by a factor of about 23,000 (uranium) to about 145,000 (hydrogen).The branch of physics concerned with studying and understanding the atomic nucleus, including its composition and the forces which bind it together, is called nuclear physics.
"Pears is something special," said Chupp. "It means that the neutrons and protons, making up the core are placed in different locations along an internal axis."
Positively charged protons are pushed away from the center of the nucleus by nuclear forces, fundamentally different from spherical symmetry forces, such as gravity.
"The new type of interaction, the effects of which we are studying, do two things, says Chupp. "Produce matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe only format and align the spin axis direction in these pear-shaped nuclei (spin is an intrinsic physical property of particles in the same category as mass or electric charge, is defined as the angular momentum or the moment intrinsic angular particle).
To determine the shape of nucleus, they produced beams of atoms of radium and radon with very short lifetime, which were accelerated, bombing other atoms, nickel, cadmium and tin.
Following this process, the nuclei were emitted gamma rays that were dispersed after a certain pattern, thus revealing pear-shaped nuclei.
"Our findings contradict some theories of the nucleus and other nuances," says Professor Peter Butler, a physicist at the University of Liverpool and leader of the study.
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| Peter Butler photo: University of Liverpool |
Measurements made will also help on scientists studying electric dipole moment (EDM) at the atomic level, research into the discovery of new techniques to exploit the special properties of isotopes of radium and radon.
These research results, along with those of nuclear physics experiments will help test the Standard Model, the best theory that physicists currently have to understand the nature of the elements which constitute the universe.
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