4D-imaging of drip-line radioactivity by detecting proton emission from <sup>54m</sup>Ni pictured with ACTAR TPC.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 34376669.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-021-24920-0 and PMC identifier 8355099.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Proton radioactivity was discovered exactly 50 years ago. First, this nuclear decay mode sets the limit of existence on the nuclear landscape on the neutron-deficient side. Second, it comprises fundamental aspects of both quantum tunnelling as well as the coupling of (quasi)bound quantum states with the continuum in mesoscopic systems such as the atomic nucleus. Theoretical approaches can start either from bound-state nuclear shell-model theory or from resonance scattering. Thus, proton-radioactivity guides merging these types of theoretical approaches, which is of broader relevance for any few-body quantum system. Here, we report experimental measurements of proton-emission branches from an isomeric state in <sup>54m</sup>Ni, which were visualized in four dimensions in a newly developed detector. We show that these decays, which carry an unusually high angular momentum, ℓ = 5 and ℓ = 7, respectively, can be approximated theoretically with a potential model for the proton barrier penetration and a shell-model calculation for the overlap of the initial and final wave functions.