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Heavy nuclei start to shape up

Mar 1, 1999

A breakthrough in the struggle to understand the synthesis and shape of superheavy elements was made recently at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago in the US. An international team of nuclear physicists from the US, France, Finland, Norway and the UK has reported that one very heavy nucleus, nobelium-254, can be remarkably stable, even when it is created in a "high-spin" state (P Reiter et al. 1999 Phys. Rev. Lett. 82 509). The publication comes amid reports of the discovery of an element with 114 protons at the JINR laboratory in Dubna, Russia. If confirmed, this will be the heaviest element yet created.

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