Super-heavy oxygen hints at problem with the laws of physics

The heaviest model of oxygen ever created falls aside mysteriously rapidly. This discovering implies an issue with our understanding of a basic forces of nature.

Yosuke Kondo on the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan and his colleagues created oxygen-28 – an isotope of oxygen with eight protons and 20 neutrons – by smashing an lively beam of fluorine atoms into liquid hydrogen.

The fluorine atoms every had 20 neutrons and 9 protons. When they collided with the liquid hydrogen, they every misplaced a proton, turning the atoms into oxygen-28. The researchers anticipated these atoms to be steady. But as an alternative, they discovered that they solely existed for a few zeptosecond, or trillionth of a billionth of a second, after which decayed into the much less heavy oxygen-24 and 4 neutrons.

“This is extremely surprising. It opens a very, very big fundamental question about nature’s strongest interaction, the nuclear strong force,” says Rituparna Kanungo at Saint Mary’s University in Canada, who was not concerned with the experiment. The robust power binds quarks collectively to make protons and neutrons, however our understanding of how precisely it really works when all these particles present up in giant numbers is at present incomplete, she says.

Kondo and his group anticipated that oxygen-28 would dangle round quite a bit longer as a result of it was regarded as “doubly magic”.

Within the nucleus of each atom, protons and neutrons are grouped into shells, every of which might accommodate particular numbers of particles. When all occupied shells are absolutely crammed, the variety of particles inside them known as “magic” and the nucleus that they comprise turns into extraordinarily steady.

If each protons and neutrons absolutely fill an atom’s shells, then it’s referred to as doubly magic. The oxygen that sustains life on Earth has this property, which is what permits it to be so considerable.

Through numerous research of isotopes like calcium-40 and nickel-48, seven numbers are broadly recognised as being magic, together with the quantity 20 for neutrons. The new experiment challenges this concept.

Theoretical fashions should be re-made, and extra experiments will have to be finished with a view to get a way of what the particles inside oxygen-28 truly do if they don’t seem to be in full and steady shells, says Kanungo.