For nearly 50 years, physicists have dreamed of the secrets they could unlock by raising the energy state of an atom's nucleus using a laser. The achievement would allow today's atomic clocks to be ...

For the first time, the state of an atomic nucleus was switched with a laser. For decades, physicists have been looking for such a nuclear transition -- now it has been found. This opens up a new ...

You might remember learning in sixth grade science class that isotopes are atoms that have lost or gained a few neutrons, and ions are atoms that have lost or gained a few electrons. But what about an ...

Scientists have provided proof for a new state of matter: an electron orbits a nucleus at a great distance, while many other atoms are bound inside the orbit. What is inside an atom, between the ...

Crystal nucleation occurs in a medium (a solution, melt or vapour) that is supersaturated with respect to a crystal. In other words, the concentration of the material dissolved in the medium is higher ...

When most of us picture an atom, we think about a small nucleus made of protons and neutrons orbited by one or more electrons. We view these electrons as point-like while rapidly orbiting the nucleus.

Famously sneaky particles have been caught behaving in a new way. For the first time, scientists have detected neutrinos scattering off the nucleus of an atom. The process, predicted more than four ...

An atom is so small that a single drop of water contains more than a billion atoms. Although tiny, atoms are mostly empty space. The simplified model of the atom is that of a cloud of negative ...

What is inside an atom, between the nucleus and the electron? Usually there is nothing, but why could there not be other particles too? If the electron orbits the nucleus at a great distance, there is ...