Like gravity, the strong interaction is a fundamental force of nature. It is the essential "glue" that holds atomic nuclei—composed of protons and neutrons— together to form atoms, the building blocks of nearly all the visible matter in the universe. Despite its prevalence in nature, researchers are still searching for the precise laws that govern the strong force. However, the recent discovery of an extremely exotic, short-lived nucleus called fluorine-14 in laboratory experiments may indicate that scientists are gaining a better grasp of these rules.
Fluorine-14 comprises nine protons and five neutrons. It exists for a tiny fraction of a second before a proton "drips" off, leaving an oxygen-13 nucleus behind. A team of researchers led by James Vary, a professor of physics at Iowa State University, first predicted the properties of fluorine-14 with the help of scientists in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's (Berkeley Lab's) Computational Research Division, as well as supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. These fundamental predictions served as motivations for experiments conducted by Vladilen Goldberg's team at Texas A&M's Cyclotron Institute, which achieved the first sightings of fluorine-14.
"This is a true testament to the predictive power of the underlying theory," says Vary. "When we published our theory a year ago, fluorine-14 had never been observed experimentally. In fact, our theory helped the team secure time on their newly commissioned cyclotron to conduct their experiment. Once their work was done, they saw virtually perfect agreement with our theory."
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