Anja Mudring is new to the Ames Laboratory as a full-time scientist, but her ties to the Lab date back to 1997 when she first came for a 2-week fellowship trip as a graduate student.
“I read in my chemistry text book about molten salts and ionic liquids and I thought it was so interesting. And a name kept popping up: John Corbett, here at Ames Laboratory. So, I wrote to John and he invited me to come here to Ames for my fellowship trip.”
Mudring returned as a postdoctoral research associate from 2001-2003, and, even after she returned to Germany to start her own research group, she continued to visit Ames Laboratory for about a month each year.
“Always in the winter. I’ve always liked the quietness in Ames in the winter. The summer feels too hot to me, so I vowed to always only come in winter.”
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Like dancers swirling on the dance floor with bystanders looking on, protons and neutrons that have briefly paired up in the nucleus have higher-average momentum, leaving less for non-paired nucleons. Using data from nuclear physics experiments carried out at the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, researchers have now shown for the first time that this phenomenon exists in nuclei heavier than carbon, including aluminum, iron and lead.
The phenomenon also surprisingly allows a greater fraction of the protons than neutrons to have high momentum in these relatively neutron-rich nuclei, which is contrary to long-accepted theories of the nucleus and has implications for ultra-cold atomic gas systems and neutron stars. The results were published online by the journal Science.
The research builds on earlier work featured in Science that found that protons and neutrons in light nuclei pair up briefly in the nucleus, a phenomenon called a short-range correlation. Nucleons prefer pairing up with nucleons of a different type (proton preferred neutrons to other protons) by 20 to 1, and nucleons involved in a short-range correlation carry higher momentum than unpaired ones.
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