Goeppert Mayer and her contemporaries explained these numbers by proposing that protons and neutrons occupy discrete energy levels, or shells. This model, which is still used to interpret many nuclear physics experiments, treats each particle in the nucleus as independent, but our best quantum theories assert that particles within nuclei actually interact strongly.
Jiangming Yao at Sun Yat-sen University in China and his colleagues have now resolved this contradiction and, in the process, elucidated how magic numbers emerge from these interactions.
Yao says the shell model relies on input from experiments and doesn’t encode details of interactions between each particle. Instead, he and his team started their calculations from first principles, which means they mathematically described how particles interact with each other, how they stick together and how much energy is needed to move them apart in more detail.
Alternate source without the paywall:
https://phys.org/news/2026-02-magic-atomic-nuclei-unusually-stable.html
Original article on arXiv (it’s a short one).
That sounds like it might be huge if it holds up. Especially if it can accurately predict much larger isotopes.
Why is accurately predicting larger isotopes a huge deal? Sincerely, a chemistry noob.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability
Maybe new super heavy elements could do cool stuff if they didn’t decay within microseconds. When trying to design ways to make them, you don’t want to waste your time making ones that aren’t going to be stable, hence the need to predict that.
Ah okay, yeah that makes sense.
So what kind of cool stuff would/might super heavy elements be able to do?
Well we know a lot about oxygen, that can do some really cool stuff. Carbon also, notably cool. For its structural properties Iron is super awesome, but it doesn’t work for everything. Aluminum can help fill in those gaps though, and when neither of those work, titanium is the go-to element. I can’t imagine where we’d be without sodium, its so important in so many chemical processes. Our entire tech industry relies heavily on silicon. Lasers wouldn’t work without those noble gasses, neon, xenon, etc. Uranium has unlocked nuclear power for humanity, thorium promises a potentially safety and cleaner future for that power.
Elements do a lot of different things and we benefit from all of them differently. It’s hard to know what a new element would do for us, but there’s always the potential for it to be important. What would our society look like without silicon for instance? Without computers the world would be very different, and until we had them, could we have any idea what we were missing?
And more relevant to super heavy artificial elements. Americium is great for smoke detectors. Plutonium is very useful for nuclear fission. Plutonium 238 has use in satellites because it constantly gives off a consistent amount of radiation and heat for decades so it serves as a power source
The type of smoke detectors that use radiation (ionization type) are kind of being phased out. How they work (which is quite clever) are a bit inferior at early and reliable detection compared to photoelectric. You can also keep photoelectric ones closer to your kitchen without them going off every time you cook some bacon or use the oven.
Cool, so the expectation could be that we would find new elements which would expand the periodic table with new stuff with potentially groundbreaking reactive, conductive, or otherwise good (new?) properties. Is that correct?
Yeah, that sums it up quite nicely!
Interesting! Looking forward to the future of world peace! 🙃
It’s more of being able to know why some elements can’t be created. There’s a large chunk of physics that we know how it works (stellar collapses or atomic collisions), and we know what to expect, but we don’t really know the ‘why’ to large chunks of it. Meaning any predictions beyond that, are just extrapolating guesses based on what we know. Filling in solid theory on the nucleus gives us a whole new range of experimentation to find new physics.
Neat. Personally I hope RAM and hard drives will drop in price because of it.
World peace and environmental sustainability too.
Oh, yeah yeah, that one!
Takes the ‘shell model’, which is exceedingly dodgy theoretically but gives good results, and reinterprets it in terms of quantum mechanics, which are pretty solid theoretically. So just need to validate it against what we already know - sounds like they did most of their work against a single isotope of tin.
(We don’t have a theory of quantum gravity, so even though quantum mechanics and general relativity are both well-studied and tested theories with enormous predictive power, they can’t quite be right. If this new result gives us a better understanding of the strong nuclear force, which it might, then it might also give us a better understanding of all forces. Getting some ‘island of stability’ larger isotopes might help with packing a lot of power into a small space; elerium-115 style, too.)
Video on the element race (in the context of a physics scandal) that this is hopefully a major breakthrough in. Talks about island of stability and magic numbers
