Hurrying a nuclear identity switch.Radioactive beryllium-7 atoms locked inside molecular cages decay extraordinarily quickly, Japanese researchers have found. The speedup is the largest such artificial hastening of an atom's decay rate ever observed. Tsutomu Ohtsuki of Tohoku University This article is Tohoku University in Japan. The same name university in China, 東北大学, is Northeastern University (Shenyang, China). Tohoku University ( in Sendai and his colleagues recorded a nearly 1 percent hike in the decay rate of beryllium-7 atoms that were each trapped inside a spherical shell-like, 60-carbon molecule known as a buckminsterfullerene buckminsterfullerene (bŭk'mĭnstərf  l`ərēn', –f , or buckyball buckyball, colloquial term for buckminsterfullerene, a roughly spherical fullerene molecule consisting of 60 carbon atoms.Buckytube is a generic term for cylindrical fullerenes. . A beryllium-7 nucleus decays into a lithium-7 atom by absorbing an electron, which converts a proton into a neutron. Inside a buckyball, the cage's electron cloud
Electron cloud is a term used, if not originally coined, by the Nobel Prize laureate and acclaimed educator Richard Feynman in The may hem in the beryllium-7's electrons so tightly that the chance of an electron-proton interaction goes up, the scientists propose in the Sept. 10 Physical Review Letters Physical Review Letters is one of the most prestigious journals in physics.[1] Since 1958, it has been published by the American Physical Society as an outgrowth of The Physical Review. . Such a large boost is remarkable because conditions that influence matter on the scale of atoms or larger--such as pressure and the chemical environment--typically exert almost no influence at the smaller scale of nuclear matter.--P.W. |
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