The image is of a new isotope of magnesium-18. The facility for rare isotope beams is located at Fudan University.
The world's lightest version of magnesium has been created thanks to the work of Michigan State University.
The NSCL's National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory is where this isotope was forged and it is so unstable that it falls apart before scientists can measure it directly. Researchers can better understand how the atoms that define our existence are made with the help of this isotope.
Scientists from Washington University in St. Louis were part of the team that was led by researchers from Peking University in China.
Kyle Brown, an assistant professor of chemistry at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, is interested in the question of where the universe's elements come from. The journal Physical Review Letters published a new study on Brown.
How are these elements made? Brown asked how the processes happen.
Scientists can use the new isotope to help develop theories and models for the mysteries.
Natural magnesium, forged in the stars, is a key component of our diet and minerals in the planet's crust. The magnesium is stable. The nucleus doesn't fall apart.
The new magnesium is too unstable to be found in nature. Scientists can push the limits of models that help explain how all nuclei are built and stay together by using particle accelerators to make increasingly exotic isotopes like this one.
This helps predict what will happen in extreme Cosmic environments that we may never be able to mimic on or measure from Earth.
Brown said that by testing the models and making them better and better, we can figure out how things work. We're measuring the things we can to predict the things we can't.
Since 1982, NSCL has been helping scientists understand the universe. When experiments begin in 2022, the tradition will continue. The mission of the DOE-SC Office of Nuclear Physics is supported by the user facility of the DOE.
Brown said that a lot of things they haven't been able to measure before. An approved experiment is set to run at the facility. We should be able to create another nucleus that hasn't been done before.
Brown has been involved with four different projects that have made new isotopes. The newest is magnesium-18.
All magnesium atoms have a nucleus. The lightest version of magnesium had 7 neutrons, giving it a total of 19 protons and neutrons.
The image is of a new isotope of magnesium-18. S. M. Wang is a researcher at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams.
The team started with a stable version of magnesium, magnesium 24. A beam of magnesium 24 nuclei was accelerated by the cyclotron at NSCL and sent into a target, which is a metal foil made from the element. That was the first step.
"That collision gives you a bunch of different isotopes lighter than magnesium," Brown said. We can pick out the isotope we want from that soup.
In this case, that is magnesium-20. This version decays within tenths of a second. The team is on a clock to get magnesium-20 to collide with another target about 100 feet away.
It's traveling at half the speed of light. It gets there very quickly.
The next collision creates magnesium-18, which has a lifetime somewhere in the vicinity of a sextillionth of a second. magnesium-18 doesn't cloak itself with electrons to become an atom before it falls apart. It is a naked nucleus.
It's only a short time that magnesium-18 leaves the target. The target has new isotope decays inside it.
Scientists can see telltale signs of its decay, but they can't examine it directly. The nucleus of Magnesium-18 contains two protons and two more protons are ejected to become neon-16 and oxygen-14. The team can deduce magnesium-18 properties by analyzing the oxygen and protons that escape the target.
This was a team effort. Brown said that everyone worked hard on the project. It's pretty exciting. It's not every day that people discover a new element.
Every year, scientists add new entries to the list of known isotopes, which are in the thousands.
"We're adding drops to a bucket, but they're important drops," Brown said. The whole team can put their names on this one. I can tell my parents that I helped discover this nucleus.
The first observation of the Four-Proton Unbound Nucleus Mg18 was published in the Physical Review Letters. There is a DOI: 10.137/physRevLett.
Journal information: Physical Review Letters.
The world's lightest-isotope of magnesium was created by a research team on December 23, 2021.
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