Conveners
Heavy Nuclei and Super Heavy Elements - Part 1
- Darek Seweryniak (Argonne National Laboratory)
The last time that an element was discovered in the US was seaborgium in 1974. Since that time, all new elements were discovered in other countries, although the US was involved in the discoveries of superheavy (SHE) elements 114 - 118 by providing the targets needed to make those elements. There is growing interest in returning the US to the forefront of element discovery. However,...
The nuclear shell model has been quite successful in describing the microscopic structure of nuclei, particularly those which are proximate to magic numbers. While spin isomers at low excitation in nuclei approaching shell closures are well known and appropriately described by the shell model, advances in experimental techniques have enabled the study of metastable states at very high...
Experiments seeking the heaviest nuclei are exploring the limits at which protons and neutrons can be bound together. Such extreme nuclear systems are difficult to produce and the details of their structure remain scarce. Theory can guide our understanding, but calculations disagree on the shell gaps where the most stable superheavy elements might be found [1, 2]. Alternatively, the nuclides...
The neutron-deficient Z = 92 uranium nuclei lie close to the centre of the light-actinide region of enhanced octupole correlations. Despite theoretical predictions of octupole de- formation (e.g. [1, 2]) giving clear motivation for experimental study, there is presently very little existing spectroscopic information concerning the structure of these nuclei. In- deed, at present, the only A <...
