Hungarian Researchers Study Doubly Magic Structure of Oxygen Nucleus in CERN LHC Particle Accelerators

According to the HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics (HUN-REN Wigner RCP), the stability of magic nuclei is important for various practical applications, such as the selection of medical isotopes and nuclear energy research, where energy from nuclear decay can be harnessed. Dubbed doubly magic, the oxygen nucleus is particularly interesting: the most common oxygen isotope, with a mass number of 16, contains 8 protons and 8 neutrons, each of which is a magic number. This closed-shell structure provides the nucleus with exceptional stability.

Gergely Gábor Barnaföldi, senior researcher at the HUN-REN Wigner RCP, in collaboration with young researchers and colleagues from the Indian Institutes of Technology, investigated whether the effects of this magical initial state could be observed in the ultra-relativistic energy collisions of oxygen nuclei planned at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The researchers examined two models to study elliptic flow (v₂), which measures one of the signatures of quark-gluon plasma, and characteristic quantities associated with triple correlations (v₃). They arrived at a surprising conclusion: the discrepancies between the two nuclear structure models are so significant that their effects should be measurable in the oxygen-oxygen collisions at the LHC. Their findings have been published in the journal Physics Letters B.