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I work at a facility called ISOLDE, which produces radioactive ion beams using the protons accelerated to high energies at CERN. You might know CERN from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), but instead of smashing protons in to each other, we slam them in to a stack of uranium foils. When the high-energy proton beam hits the uranium atoms in the foils it causes nuclear reactions, which produces a whole range of radioactive isotopes.

I want to look for isotopes where the nucleus is shaped like a pear. To do this, we have to separate out all the other rubbish that is produced and select atoms of a single isotopes of a single element. This is like finding a needle in a haystack, but we have lots of tricks up our sleeves, like using finely-tuned lasers, powerful magnets and high-power accelerators.

We recently found that radium-224, which has a half-life of only 3.6 days is one of these rare pear-shaped isotopes, only the second one to be confirmed! At the same time, we noticed that radon-220 behaved a bit like a wobbly pear and it was vibrating between a rugby-ball shape to a pear shape.

A cartoon of what the nucleus of radon-220 looks like.

Our new project is using an old Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine from a hospital to do nuclear reactions. Did you know that MRI machines use the principle of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) to image inside of the body and to diagnose everything from broken bones to tumours? Well it’s basically just a really big, powerful magnet, which turns out to be really useful for bending particles. We’re now using it like a camera to study nuclear reactions like those that created the elements we see today in big astronomical events like exploding stars.

A recycled MRI magnet from Australia, without all the shiny plastic parts. Now it’s used for looking at nuclear reactions at CERN.