Spontaneous Separation of Charged Grains

Physicists at the GANIL lab in France create the heaviest isotope of hydrogen, H7, by smashing a helium-8 beam into a gas get of isobutane. Among the debris particles is, very rarely, the isotope in question---a short-lived resonance particle consisting of one proton and six neutrons. This object quickly decays into a nitrogen-13 nucleus, whose progress through the experiment can be detected in a hexagonal device at the bottom.

Reported by: Caamano et al in Physical Review Letters

Associated Physics News Update 834, item 1

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