In nuclear beta decay an up quark ‘u’ in a proton converts into an up down quark ‘d,’ turning the proton into a neutron and emitting a positron and a neutrino. This work affects interpretation of beta ...

Tuesday, the University of Wisconsin Department of Engineering Physics hosted nuclear engineer Peter Yarsky as he presented his mathematical model of the pandemic through the lens of nuclear ...

For many years, cesium atomic clocks have been reliably keeping time around the world. But the future belongs to even more accurate clocks: optical atomic clocks. In a few years' time, they could ...

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new method to predict plasma behavior in a nuclear reactor (tokamak) during a rampdown. Rampdown is the process of safely ...

Delve into the detail of atomic physics. As the basic units of matter, atoms are the building blocks for everything in the universe. Once thought to be indivisible, we now know they can indeed be ...

Some atoms are stable, while others seem to fall apart. Lead-208 will probably last forever, while the synthetic isotope technetium-99 exists for just hours. The difference lies in the structure of ...

That all changed on Feb. 11, 1939, with a letter to the editor of Nature – a premier international scientific journal – that described exactly how such a thing could occur and even named it fission.