Saturday, August 26, 2006

Smallest Pyramids in the Universe

Now, Jerzy Dudek of the Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France, and his colleagues at Warsaw University and the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid claim that the old results can be explained by arguing that some nuclei, made in the tempestuous conditions of a sufficiently high-energy collision, can exist in the form of a tetrahedron or a octahedron.

Like a pyramid-shaped methane (CH4) molecule held together by the electromagnetic force, a pyramidal nucleus would consist of protons and neutrons held together by the strong nuclear force.

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