3rd USIAS Fellows Seminar

The origins of chemical elements – new ways of studying clustering in nuclei

Professor David Jenkins, University of York, USIAS Fellow 2013

A few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, protons and electrons cooled down enough to settle into atoms of hydrogen and, to a much lesser degree, helium and traces of other elements. Until the universe was millions of years old and stars began to form, no other elements are thought to have existed in significant amounts.
Stars and are responsible for the creation of all the heavy elements we find in our Earth. In particular, carbon, which is essential for life, is believed to be produced by fusion at the core of massive stars.

Despite the mechanism for this being suggested in the 1950s, we still do not fully understand the mechanism involved and it is suggested that clustering in nuclei is very important in this process. Clustering, in this sense, means considering the nucleus of the atom as made of building blocks of alpha particles, which are not themselves a fundamental particle, rather than protons and neutrons. Direct evidence in favour of a cluster model of the nucleus is hard to come by. David Jenkins’ USIAS research addresses some key issues associated with clustering in nuclei and will propose to carry out some new experiments that demonstrate clearly whether clustering is present or not. The project has the potential to open up new directions in nuclear physics and may have important applications to nuclear astrophysics – the origin of the chemical elements.