Sodium on Steroids: A Nuclear Physics Breakthrough Thought To Be Impossible
International Conference on Nuclear Physics
Nuclear physicists at RIKEN have successfully created an extremely neutron-rich isotope of sodium, 39Na, previously predicted by many atomic nuclei models to be non-existent. This discovery has significant implications for our understanding of atomic nuclei structure and the astrophysical processes that form heavier elements on Earth.
If you made table salt from this super-heavy version of sodium—and the most neutron-rich isotope of chlorine, salt’s other constituent—it would taste and behave like normal salt, except it would be roughly 1.6 times heavier, says nuclear physicist Toshiyuki Kubo.
But far more than being a scientific curiosity, this finding has important implications for theories on the structure of atomic nuclei. This knowledge in turn informs our understanding of the astrophysical processes that form Earth’s heavier elements.
In terms of nuclear theory, the finding provides a vital reference point for tweaking models of neutron-rich nuclei and for assessing their accuracy, explains Kubo. Theoretical studies of neutron-rich nuclei involve extremely complicated calculations, and theoretical physicists have so far only been able to precisely model more stable nuclei with few neutrons. This finding could help refine calculations for nuclei with more neutrons.
This in turn has implications for our understanding about the origins of heavier elements. For example, the nuclear astrophysical processes that create Earth’s heavy metals are thought to be the result of the huge amounts of energy produced by the merger of two neutron stars or collisions of neutron stars and black holes. The gas and dust released eventually contribute to the rare materials of planets, such as Earth. However, the exact processes that produce heavy metals have long been debated.
Each of the 118 known elements has a fixed number of protons (11 in the case of sodium), but the number of neutrons in its nuclei has can vary, notes Kubo. The only stable form of sodium contains 12 neutrons, whereas the newly discovered one has more than double at 28, which is two more neutrons than the previous record holder for the most-neutron-rich isotope of sodium, 37Na, which was discovered more than 20 years ago.
Since neutrons are electrically neutral, they don’t influence an atom’s electrons and hence have no effect on the element’s chemistry. Thus, atoms of the same element that contain different numbers of neutrons—known as isotopes—are chemically indistinguishable.
The impetus to search for the new form of sodium (called 39Na because its nucleus contains 39 neutrons and protons) came from a previous experiment, when a team led by Kubo at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science stumbled upon what appeared to be one nucleus of 39Na. “We were very surprised at this one event,” recalls Kubo. “And so, we decided to revisit the search for 39Na in our present experiment.”
In the latest experiment, they put the existence of 39Na beyond all doubt by creating nine nuclei of the isotope in a two-day run at RIKEN’s Radioactive Isotope Beam Factory—one of only about three nuclear facilities in the world currently capable of producing such nuclei.
But the discovery of 39Na, has special significance for him, not least because many nuclear models predict that it shouldn’t exist. “The discovery makes a significant impact on nuclear mass models and nuclear theories that address the edge of the nuclear stability, because it provides a key benchmark for their validation,” explains Kubo. For example, Kubo notes that a model developed by a Japanese team in 2020 correctly predicted the existence of 39Na and its predictions for other isotopes have been on target[2], boosting its credibility.
One reason the discovery is important is because 39Na could well be the most neutron-rich version of sodium that it is possible to produce. Nuclear physicists are particularly interested in determining the maximum number of neutrons an element can have before it starts leaking neutrons—a quantity known as the neutron drip line when plotted on a table of nuclei. The location of this limit provides a key benchmark to not only nuclear theories, but also nuclear mass models that play a key role in theories of nucleosynthesis.
One reason why it is hard to measure the dripline is because of the tiny possibilities involved in creating nuclei that lie close to limits of stability. Another difficulty is that it is extremely challenging to rule out the existence of other nuclei that have even more neutrons. Kubo says that it may be possible to make 41Na, in which case it would become the dripline for sodium, although he notes that the 2020 Japanese model predicts that 39Na is the drip line.
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#Radioactivity#Fission#Fusion#AtomicStructure#NuclearResearch
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