Pugwash calls for new roles for Aldermaston
Aldermaston has over 4000 employees and a budget of £300m. Over half of this (£168m) is spent on the manufacture, maintenance and testing of nuclear weapons, and on related research. Another...
Light plays tricks with nuclei
Just as electrons can be excited inside an atom, neutrons and protons can be excited from their ground states into higher-energy states inside the nucleus. If these states have long half-lifes then th...
Read article: Light plays tricks with nuclei
Nuclear monitoring network passes first test
Governments that have signed the CTBT – which will come into force this September – are concerned that countries such as Iran, India and Iraq might try to develop so called ‘sub-crit...
Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg dies
Seaborg shared the 1951 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with the physicist Edwin McMillan. In addition to a long career at the University of California and the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, both in Berkele...
Whatever happened to cold fusion?
Some researchers remain adamant that cold fusion is real, as David Voss reports
Heavy nuclei start to shape up
The existence of superheavy elements was predicted about 30 years ago on the basis of the nuclear shell model, which was originally developed in 1949. The model explains why nuclei with certain “...
First hint of element 114 seen in Dubna
Researchers at the Dubna Laboratory of Heavy Ion Nuclear Reactions in Russia, headed by Yuri Oganessian, collaborating with a team from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, made the d...
Thomson scattering goes relativistic
Donald Umstadter and co-workers used a neodymium-glass laser to illuminate helium gas in a vacuum chamber. The team were able to focus 4 trillion watts of power on the gas. The electric field of the l...
UK plans £65m facility
The UK at present has no nuclear physics facilities of its own, and very little investment in facilities overseas. “SIRIUS would open up many opportunities in a number of areas, most notably in ...
India and Pakistan lied about nuclear tests
These latest results, according to Barker et al., indicate “high confidence” that the network being set up to monitor the CTBT can indeed verify small nuclear explosions. Concerns over the...
