Physicists in Finland have created an atomic nucleus in the shape of a pumpkin that ejectsprotons as a result of a rare
According to PhysicsWorld, the lutetium-149 nucleus has the mostthe shortest half-life among all radioactive elements that are emitters of protons. It loses half of its radioactivity (decays into other elements) in just 450 nanoseconds.
Lutetium is a rare-earth element that naturally appears as a silvery metal with 71 protons and 71 neutrons in its nucleus.It is usually found in the earth's crust together with the metallic element ytterbium.In the 1980s, scientists observed an isotope of lutetium, a variant of the atom with a different number of neutrons in the nucleus known as lutetium-151, which decayed and ejected a proton from the nucleus while in its ground state.The ground state is the lowest level of energy that canThe emission of protons occursrarely, and lutetium-151 was the first isotope to emit protons when decaying in a stable ground state.
Studying the decay of a proton allows researchers to look inside the nucleus of an atom and understand how protons and neutrons are related to each other.As part of this line of research, Kalle Auranen, a postdoctoral researcher in physics at the University of Jyväskylä, and his colleagues have created a new isotope of lutetium, lutetium-149, which contains 71 protons and 78 neutrons in its nucleus.
They found that lutetium-149 was even stranger than lutetium-151.For one thing, its core is not a neat sphere, but rather an oblong compressed sphere that looks a bit like a pumpkin.Second, the half-life of lutetium-149 is significantly shorter than that of lutetium-151, which is80.6 milliseconds.
As part of the new study, the scientists created the isotope by burning an isotope of nickel (nickel-58) with an isotope of ruthenium (ruthenium-96).The new isotope of lutetium decays into ytterbium-148, which by itself cannotIt has a half-life of 250 milliseconds.
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