For nearly 50 years, physicists have dreamed of the secrets they could unlock by raising the energy state of an atom's nucleus using a laser. The achievement would allow today's atomic clocks to be ...

Researchers have been able to initiate a controlled movement in the very heart of an atom. They caused the atomic nucleus to interact with one of the electrons in the outermost shells of the atom.

This image depicts the radium atom’s pear-shaped nucleus of protons and neutrons in the center, surrounded by a cloud of electrons (yellow), and an electron (yellow ball with arrow) that has a ...

Scientists at Delft University of Technology have managed to watch a single atomic nucleus flip its magnetic state in real time. Using a scanning tunneling microscope, they indirectly read the nucleus ...

For the first time in almost 30 years, the heaviest nucleus decaying via proton emission has been measured. The previous similar breakthrough was achieved in 1996. The radioactive decay of atomic ...

For the first time, quarks and gluons were used to describe properties of atomic nuclei, which until now had been explained by the existence of protons and neutrons. The temporary pair of correlated ...

A new measurement of the strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together, confirms previous hints of an uncomfortable truth: We still don’t have a solid theoretical grasp of even the ...