A team of researchers, including scientists from the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory and the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at Michigan State University, have solved the case of zirconium-80’s missing mass.

Maya Wallach, 16, was homeschooled to earn her high school diploma two years early. She is now enrolled full-time as a sophomore at Michigan State University studying experimental physics, one of the most complex fields taught on campus. She also works an internship at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams. A subscription to the Lansing State Journal is required to view this article.

One of the most spectacular quantum effects in atomic nuclei is the emergence of a shell structure. Important questions such as the origin of an additional binding energy in nuclei, where neutrons and protons occupy the same shell orbitals, remain open. Now, as they describe in Nature Physics, FRIB's Alec Hamaker and colleagues have provided answers to this question by performing accurate mass measurements of zirconium isotopes.

Achim Schwenk (Institute of Nuclear Physics at the Darmstadt University of Technology), a member of the FRIB Users Organization, has been named on the annual Highly Cited Researchers 2021 list from Clarivate. Clarivate is a scientific publication analytics firm. The list identifies researchers who demonstrated significant influence in their chosen field or fields through the publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade. Their names are drawn from the publications that rank in the top 1 percent by citations for field and publication year in the “Web of Science” citation index.

Researchers are queuing up to use a particle accelerator at Michigan State University to study some of the rarest atomic nuclei. When it opens in early 2022, the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams will strip electrons off of atoms to make ions, rev them up to high speeds and then send them crashing into a target to make the special nuclei that scientists want to study.