I've had a few emails forwarding the announcement of a conference celebrating the 40th annversary of Halo Nuclei. The circular is not a very colourful, but I paste the top of the pdf below.
Since the image is not clickable (except to see it at higher resolution), here is the link above if you want to follow it.
I have never worked on halo nuclei – light nuclei in which the last particle (or two or three) are not tighly bound to all the others, but which exist in a very extended halo – but that put me a bit at odds with much of the theory group here at Surrey when I arrived. They had been using their reaction theory expertise to really become the go-to group in the world for understanding and interpreting the experiments in which these halo nuclei are formed. If I look up the Google Scholar pages for some of my now-emeritus colleagues like Jeff Tostevin, Jim Al-Khalili, and Ian Thompson, you can see "halo nulei" in the title of papers from the 90s which are all very high-up in each of their all-time highest-cited papers.
Because of the peculiar structure of these halo nuclei, only a very few isotopes in the whole nuclear chart could ever be possible candidates, and it's no surprising that they are no longer at the cutting edge of nuclear research. That's not to say that there is nothing going on in the area of halo nuclei studies - they are still interesting systems both for experimental and theoretical study, but the lowest-lying fruit was picked some time ago and the number of people working on the remaining hardest problems is small.
Not having anything really to do with halo nuclei, I definitely don't intend to go to the conference, but I hope they invite one of the more-recently retired colleagues from Surrey to relate the theory work from 30-40 years ago. What you might find interesting to read is a Physics World article from 1996 which represents one of Jim Al-Khlalili's earliest public outreach works, entitled Nuclei on the Dripline.
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