The heaviest version of oxygen ever created falls apart mysteriously quickly, which suggests a problem with our understanding of a fundamental force of nature.
Yosuke Kondo at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan and his colleagues created oxygen-28, an isotope of oxygen with eight protons and 20 neutrons. They achieved this by smashing an energetic beam of fluorine atoms into liquid hydrogen. The researchers expected these atoms to be stable, but instead, they found that oxygen-28 only existed for about a zeptosecond, or trillionth of a billionth of a second, before decaying into oxygen-24 and four neutrons.
This discovery raises questions about the nuclear strong force, which is nature’s strongest interaction and binds quarks together to form protons and neutrons. Our current understanding of how this force works when particles appear in large numbers is incomplete.
Previous expectations were that oxygen-28, being “doubly magic”, would be more stable. Doubly magic refers to when both protons and neutrons fully fill an atom’s shells. Oxygen-28 challenges this notion and calls for the revision of theoretical models.
Further experiments are necessary to explore the behavior of the particles inside oxygen-28 when they are not in full and stable shells.
