Researchers Perform Quite a Magic Trick: Making Nickel‐48 Materialize

FEB 01, 2000

⁴⁸Ni has so many more protons than neutrons that it ought to fall apart, but it is stabilized by having just the right number of both nucleons to form closed shells.

DOI: 10.1063/1.882959

Barbara Goss Levi

Chalk up another one for the shell model…maybe its last one for a while. The model has had a long run in predicting which nuclei would have special stability compared to their neighboring isotopes because they had the right numbers of protons and neutrons—magic numbers—to completely fill the available shells, or energy levels. By now, experimenters have found about ten doubly magic nuclei (in which the numbers of protons and neutrons are both magic) but still sought one elusive holdout: ${}^{48}{Ni} .$ A group of researchers working at the Grande Accélérateur National d’Ions Lourds (GANIL) in France has now produced this lightest of nickel’s isotopes. (Two other isotopes of nickel are also doubly magic.)