An international team of physicists led by nuclear physicist Yosuke Kondo of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan has discovered Oxygen-28, a new isotope of Oxygen.
Oxygen-28 is an isotope of Oxygen with 20 neutrons and 8 protons. Oxygen-28 is also the heaviest version of Oxygen ever created. The finding of O-28 is a huge step forward and a key topic for future nuclear experiments and theoretical research. The full research paper was published in Nature.
Because of its exceptionally high neutron-to-proton ratio, Oxygen-28 is extremely rare in nature.
What is Oxygen-28?
Because the proton number Z = 8 and neutron number N = 20 are both ‘ magical numbers,’ the Oxygen-28 nucleus is projected to be one of a relatively small number of so-called ‘doubly magical’ nuclei in the traditional shell-model image of nuclear structure.
The comparison of hitherto intractable theoretical predictions with Oxygen-28 is a significant test of our fundamental understanding of the nuclear universe, demonstrating that Oxygen-28Â helps constrain many characteristics of the underlying theory.
The study of rare isotopes with high neutron/proton imbalances, such as Oxygen-28, is one of the most active fields of modern nuclear physics.
The most advanced ab initio theories utilized in nuclear physics are based on effective versions of quantum chromodynamics and are exceedingly intricate, taking hundreds of hours to analyze on supercomputers.
The team used ground-breaking UQ methods for the research
As a result, they are too sluggish to generate realistic predictions, impeding the essential scientific process of comparing theory to experiment.
The team used ground-breaking UQ methods (emulation and history matching) developed in our Mathematical Sciences department to show that measuring Oxygen-28 properties can provide valuable constraints on such theoretical approaches and, more importantly, the specific nuclear interactions used.
The application of modern UQ methods enabled the study team to make reasonable predictions of Oxygen-28Â qualities that were previously entirely intractable, as well as to expedite the essential scientific process of comparing theoretical predictions with experimental results.
The team who supported the theoretical predictions of this research was: Gaute Hagen, Thomas Papenbrock, and Zhonghao Sun at ORNL; Andreas Ekström, Christian Forssén, and Weiguang Jiang at Chalmers University of Technology.
