THE DISCOVERY OF THE NUCLEAR SHELL MODEL AND "MAGIC NUMBERS"

MAYER, MARIA G. & EDWARD TELLER.

On the Origin of Elements.

Lancaster, American Institute of Physics, 1949. Lex8vo. Volume 76, October 15, No. 8, 1949 of "The Physical Review", Second Series. Entire volume offered. In the original printed blue wrappers. Previous owner's name to vaguely stamped to top right corner of front wrapper. Minor traces of wear to extremities and a few small tears to spine. Overall a very nice and clean copy. Pp. 1226-1231. [Entire issue: Pp. 1005-1274].

First printing of Mayer's seminal paper which led to the finding of "magic number" and the Goeppert-Mayer "shell model". Marie Goeppert-Mayer and Marie Curie are the only two women to have received the Nobel Prize in Physics.

The nuclear shell model is partly analogous to the atomic shell model which describes the arrangement of electrons in an atom. The nuclear shell model describes the structure of the nucleus in terms of energy based on the Pauli exclusion principle.

"With Edward Teller in 1947, Marie Goeppert-Mayer began work on the origin of elements, which led to the finding that stable elements contained what would become known as "magic numbers", or patterns in the number of particles their nuclei contain. This ultimately led Goeppert-Mayer to the "shell model" of the nucleus - the theory that atomic nuclei owe their stability to the existence of relatively fixed "shells" or orbits upon which proton and neutrons travel. While other physicists also had envisioned a shell model, there was no convincing evidence until Marie Goeppert-Mayer, acting on a suggestion made by Enrico Fermi, and German scientist H. H. D. Jensen, working simultaneously but seperatly, discovered that spin-orbit coupling occurred within nuclei." (Cullen-DuPont, Kathryn. Encyclopedia of women's history in America, 2000, p. 102)

"When Teller and I worked on a paper on the origin of elements, I stumbled over the magic numbers. We found that there were a few nuclei which had a greater isotopic as well as cosmic abundance than our theory or any other reasonable continuum theory could possible explain. Then I found that those nuclei had something in common: they either had 82 neutrons, whatever the associated proton number, or 50 neutrons. Eighty-two and fifty are " magic " numbers. That nuclei of this type are unusually abundant indicates that the excess stability must have played a part in the process of the creation of elements." (Marie Goeppert-Mayer's Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1963)

Order-nr.: 43514