A new study by a team of physicists may help scientists better understand the basic physical properties of an atom’s nucleus.

James Vary, ISU professor of physics, and Peter Navratil, research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Tri-Valley region of East San Francisco, are part of the research team that’s examining the atom.

“The practical applications of this work is to unravel the basic secrets of nature,” Vary said, “to learn why nature behaves this way and to pin that understanding down to a very fundamental level.”

Bruce Barrett, professor of physics at the University of Arizona, is leading the team and has been working with atoms since he was a graduate student at Stanford University in 1965.

“The theoretical tool [called the ab initio] is our new computer code,” Barrett said. “It will allow us to perform these extremely large calculations of the properties of atomic nuclei.”

Team members have developed a theory to explain some of the “mysteries” that occur when particles inside the nucleus of the carbon-12 atom interact.

“By mysteries, we mean why the nucleus behaves as it does,” Barrett said.

“Why are the binding energies of nuclei what we observe them to be and why do they vary in the observed way?”

Navratil began to work on these calculations when he came to the University of Arizona in 1995.

The “ab initio” model will aid scientists as they explore behaviors in the nucleus, Barrett said.

“‘Ab initio’ literally means ‘from the beginning’ or in our sense, from the fundamentals or from the first principles,” he said.

Vary also has been conducting research on the atom since he was a graduate student at Yale University in 1965.

“We are now able, after decades of work by many people, to do very precise calculations to compare with the experimental results,” he said.

“We will be able to explain some of the exotic behavior experimentalists encounter at the nuclear level.”

Barrett said the model is important for several reasons.

“[The tool] is significant since physicists have been doing nuclear-structure calculations since the 1950s,” he said.

“They have only been able to do really fundamental calculations in large dimensions since the earlier 1990s. That is due to the huge advances in computer technology.”

The team published an article titled “Properties of Carbon 12 in the Ab Initio Nuclear Shell Model” in the June 19 issue of Physical Review Letters.