Super-heavy oxygen raises questions about the physics's applicability

Significantly less stable than anticipated, this unprecedentedly heavy version of oxygen raises questions about how well we comprehend the nuclear strong force.

Even the heaviest form of oxygen ever made mysteriously breaks down quickly. This finding suggests that there may be an issue with how we perceive a fundamental force of nature.


By slamming a powerful beam of fluorine atoms into liquid hydrogen, Yosuke Kondo at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan and his colleagues produced oxygen-28, an isotope of oxygen with eight protons and 20 neutrons.


Each fluorine atom included nine protons and twenty neutrons. They each lost a proton in the collision with the liquid hydrogen, transforming the atoms into oxygen-28. These atoms should be stable, according to the experts. Instead, scientists discovered that they were only there for a tiny fraction of a second, or a zeptosecond, before decomposing into the lighter oxygen-24 and four neutrons.


"This is quite unexpected. It raises a very, very important basic question concerning the nuclear strong force, which is nature's strongest interaction, according to Rituparna Kanungo of Saint Mary's University in Canada, who was not engaged with the experiment. Protons and neutrons are created by the strong force, which binds quarks together. However, she claims that we still don't fully grasp how the strong force operates when all of these particles are present in enormous quantities.


Being considered to be "doubly magic," oxygen-28 was anticipated by Kondo and his team to last significantly longer.


Every atom's nucleus is made up of protons and neutrons that are organised into shells, each of which may hold a certain number of particles. The amount of particles that are there when all occupied shells are entirely filled is known as "magic" and the nucleus that they make up becomes incredibly stable.


It is referred to as double miraculous when the shells of an atom are completely filled with protons and neutrons. This characteristic of oxygen, which permits it to be so abundant, is what allows life on Earth to exist.


Seven numbers, including the number 20 for neutrons, have been generally known as being magical through various investigations of isotopes like calcium-40 and nickel-48. This notion is contested by the new experiment.


In order to understand what the particles inside oxygen-28 truly do if they are not in full and stable shells, theoretical models will need to be revised and more tests will need to be conducted, according to Kanungo.