Direct mapping of nuclear shell effects in the heaviest elements

Abstract

Quantum-mechanical shell effects are expected to strongly enhance nuclear binding on an "island of stability" of superheavy elements. The predicted center at proton number $Z=114,120$, or $126$ and neutron number $N=184$ has been substantiated by the recent synthesis of new elements up to $Z=118$. However the location of the center and the extension of the island of stability remain vague. High-precision mass spectrometry allows the direct measurement of nuclear binding energies and thus the determination of the strength of shell effects. Here, we present such measurements for nobelium and lawrencium isotopes, which also pin down the deformed shell gap at $N=152$.

9 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Nuclear Ground-State Masses and Deformations
• Shell structure of superheavy nuclei in self-consistent mean-field models
• Superheavy nuclei in selfconsistent nuclear calculations
• Magic numbers for superheavy nuclei in relativistic continuum Hartree-Bogoliubov theory

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