The Chinese state news agency Xinhua described the accomplishment as "a key step towards the development of a fusion reactor." ...

Researchers from Kyushu University, Japan have revealed how a special type of force within an atom's nucleus, known as the three-nucleon force, impacts nuclear stability. The study, published in ...

A fusion process that produces nuclei lighter than iron-56 or nickel-62 will generally release energy. These elements have relatively small mass per nucleon and large binding energy per nucleon.

It has 92 protons and, thus, is much lighter than the four just added to the periodic table. The new elements are very difficult to observe and probably do not exist spontaneously in nature — at least ...

This process, used in nuclear physics to synthesize artificial superheavy nuclei, seems at first glance as simple as it is brutal: take a heavy nucleus (here plutonium-244) and bombard it with lighter ...

In both cases, energy is freed because the mass of the remaining nucleus is smaller than the mass of the reacting nuclei. The reason why opposite processes release energy can be understood by ...