Nuclear physicists at the GANIL laboratory in France have created nickel-48 nuclei - the last of the so-called "doubly magic" nuclei - for the first time. The discovery will shed new light on theories of nuclear structure. A nickel-48 nucleus contains a magic number of neutrons (20) and a magic number of protons (28). Magic-number nuclei are expected to be very stable, but some theorists had predicted that nickel-48 would be unstable because it contains 11 fewer neutrons than the most common isotope of nickel.
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