Well hello neptunium-220

The discovery has been announced, in Physical Review Letters (here, but paywalled) of a new isotope of element number 93, Neptunium (Np).  It's Np–220, with 93 protons and 127 neutrons.  

This isotope is a long way from the nearest stable isotope, as can be seen on this section of the nuclear chart, with proton number Z increasing along the vertical axis and neutron number N along the horizontal axis:

Np–220 is at the top left of the chart.  The stable isotopes are the black ones, with the nearest either involving losing many protons to go towards bismuth and lead, or to gain many neutrons to get towards the stable uranium isotopes. 

It's possible to make these very far-from-stability isotopes by reacting together two lighter nuclei, in which the stable isotopes tend to have a N:Z ratio which is close to that of Np–220.  The actual reaction used was to fuse argon–40 with rhenium–185, making a very excited Np–225 nucleus, and then looking for decays in which 5 neutrons are emitted. 

The experiments were performed in Lanzhou, China, and the resulting observation of alpha decay of Np–220 led to the conclusion that the extra stability conferred by the N=126 magic number survives into this far-from-stability region.

Thanks, as ever, to Ed Simpson, for providing the #1 online chart of the isotopes at http://people.physics.anu.edu.au/~ecs103/chart/index.php

Welcome to O-11

The discovery of a new isotope was announced last week in Physical Review Letters (paper here, but it seems no open-access version exists, even on the arXiv).  Oxygen–11, aka ¹¹O, has 8 protons (because it's oxygen) and 3 neutrons (to give it overall mass number 11).  That's a pretty extreme form of Oxygen, whose lightest stable isotope has 8 protons and 8 neutrons.

To make it, the experimenters from the NSCL (National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at Michigan State University) started from a beam of stable oxygen–16 nuclei which they collided on a beryllium–9 (4 protons, 5 neutrons) target.  This bombarding produced a range of nuclei lighter than the oxygen–16 beam from which a magnetic separator was used to focus the oxygen–13 component of the debris into a secondary beam.  This was then sent to another beryllium–9 target.  Some of the reactions between the oxygen–13 and beryllium–9 nuclei caused two neutrons to be knocked out of the oxygen–13 to give oxygen–11.  Oxygen–11 quickly decays to carbon–9 (6 protons, 3 neutrons) and two protons.  These decay products were detected;  their coincident detection and the ability to reconstruct from the detection the properties of the parent oxygen–11 nuclei, repeated through thousands of events enabled the research team to confirm that indeed oxygen–11 had been produced.  

Oxygen–11 is so unstable that it decays not by one of the three traditional radioactive decay mechanisms (alpha, beta, or gamma) but by losing two of its protons, and hence undergoing "two proton radioactivity".  This puts it on the borderline of actually existing as a nucleus at all.  The nucleus is so short-lived and unstable that it does not have a well-defined mass (or equivalently its ground state is not a stationary state of the nuclear Hamiltonian).  The experimental values of the observed mass of ¹¹O is seen to have a spread of values ranging over about 3 MeV/c².

The picture above is taken from Ed Simpson's excellent Colourful Nuclear Chart.  It currently has a blank space where oxygen–11 will no doubt soon go, just above nitrogen–10, and to the left of oxygen–12.  The black tramlines in the plot show the so–called magic numbers which are numbers of protons and/or neutrons which confer extra stability to the nucleus.  These cross each other at oxygen–10.  I doubt if oxygen–10 will really turn out to be noticeably stable compared to its neighbours.  There is already enough evidence that the magic numbers don't apply in light nuclei so far from stability.  I wonder if the odd stray oxygen–10 nucleus was made in the experiment at NSCL, in too little a quantity to get a good measurement of.

Two new isotopes: Boron-20 and Boron-21

I noticed a new paper appear on the arXiv this morning, announcing the discovery of two new isotopes;  boron–20 and boron–21.  Boron has atomic number 5, so each boron nucleus has 5 protons.  There are two stable isotopes; boron-10 with 5 neutron and boron-11 with 6 neutron.  Boron–20 and –21 have 15 and 16 neutrons respectively.  That large asymmetry between the number of neutron and protons makes the isotopes unstable.  They are so unstable that the last neutrons do not even stick on to the nucleus for long and they decay by emitting one or two neutrons.  The live long enough to be identified as a resonance state in experiment, which is exactly what happened in the experiment that led to their discovery. 

Figure from arXiv:1901.00455

The experiment took place at the Radioactive Isotope Beam Facility (RIBF) at RIKEN Nishina Center, in Japan.  A beam of calcium–48 ions was fired at a beryllium target at very high energy, causing some of calcium nuclei to have a number of their protons and neutrons ripped off to give lighter isotopes of various sorts.  From this cocktail of fragments, the experimenters extracted nitrogen–22 and carbon–22 which were then directed onto a second target (of carbon) where some reactions knocked protons out of the nitrogen–22 and carbon–22 nuclei to form the previously-unknown boron isotopes. The snapshot taken from the paper in the arXiv shows the reactions taking place.  The plot is a section of the Segrè chart in which isotopes are shown with increasing proton number in the y-direction and increasing neutron number in the x-direction.  The arrows show the proton knockout reactions leading to the boron isotopes.  The red line marks out the neutron drip-line, separating those nuclei which are stable with respect to losing a neutron, and those which are not.  

Though the paper just appeared on the arXiv today, it was published in Physical Review Letters on 27th December.  Odd to put it on the arXiv only after it has been published elsewhere, but at least it means it reaches a wider audience (including me!), albeit belatedly.  Unfortunately the arXiv is not as widely adopted in nuclear physics as astro or high energy physics.