Image of the week: a potential energy pizza

By Colin Adcock on March 16, 2015

Pizza is one of the most popular dishes in the world, and can be topped with almost anything. But this time, it’s not quite edible.

The slice in our image of the week isn’t your traditional pizza, its actually illustrating the potential energy surfaces (PES) of even-even N = 40 isotones. It’s part of the larger figure (below) which has similar PES pizza slices for other N = 40 isotones, from ⁶²Ti all the way up to ⁸⁰Zr as calculated in a recent paper published in JPhysG.

Potential energy surfaces of even–even N = 40 isotones in the β−γ plane, from Z H Wang et al 2015 J. Phys. G: Nucl. Part. Phys. 42 045108

The potential energy surface in the diagram is in the β−γ plane and extracted from constrained coherent density functional theory calculations. But what does the image show? According to the authors:

The PES shown in the figure nicely illustrate the rapid transition of the spherical, oblate and prolate shapes along the isotonic chain of N = 40.

Find out more about the shape evolution of these nuclei and what the figure represents in the full paper published in JPhysG.

Figure: Potential energy surfaces of even–even N = 40 isotones in the β−γ plane, from Z H Wang et al 2015 J. Phys. G: Nucl. Part. Phys. 42 045108. Copyright IOP Publishing 2015.