CERN Physicists Find Neon-20 Nucleus Deforms Into Bowling Pin Shape
Updated
Updated · ScienceAlert · Aug 21
CERN Physicists Find Neon-20 Nucleus Deforms Into Bowling Pin Shape
3 articles · Updated · ScienceAlert · Aug 21
Summary
Neon-20 collisions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider produced flow patterns consistent with a bowling pin-shaped nucleus, giving physicists fresh evidence that neon is not spherical.
CMS reached that result by comparing oxygen-16 and neon-20 collision runs, tracking elliptic and triangular flow to infer each nucleus’s underlying geometry from the particles emitted.
The strongest signal appeared in elliptic flow during the most head-on collisions, where differences in nuclear shape should be most visible.
Triangular-flow measurements did not quantitatively match model predictions, so the team said more work is needed even as the data show collective flow is sensitive to nuclear geometry.
Published in Physical Review Letters, the finding suggests colliders could become a new tool for probing atomic nuclei and refining models of small-system collectivity.