My University produced a press release yesterday highlighting three of my colleagues and their industry in discovering nuclear isomers. Isomers (for nuclear physicists) are long-lived excited states of nuclei that decay with different properties (such as half lives) to the ground states or other excited states in the same nucleus.
The industriousness of my colleagues comes from a league table of coauthorship of isomer discovery papers. Surrey authors take three of the top 10 positions in the table. We also have some other people a bit further down: Bill Gelletly at #49, Wilton Catford at #139, Dan Doherty at #733, and ... me (Paul Stevenson) at #486.
The point of any of the research is not to top a league table, and the website that generated the table has, as its main purpose, the role of documenting discovery and keeping an authorotative record of how, when and where each isotope was discovered. The league table is just a bit of natural human interest addition to the history.
Here is a screengrab of the top of the table
No comments:
Post a Comment