Zoom Meeting ID: 882 1302 1012

Passcode: 823670

Speaker: Professor Emanuel Indrei （Kennesaw State University）

Title:  The critical mass problem

Abstract: Gamow developed his model of atomic nuclei with a 1930 paper and it successfully predicts the spherical shape of nuclei and the non-existence of nuclei with a large atomic number. More specifically, assuming E to be a (three-dimensional) nucleus with constant density one, the number of nucleons corresponds approximately to the Lebesgue measure of the nucleus, |E|=m. In the surface energy, the surface tension keeps the nucleus together and the repulsion energy encodes the repulsion among the protons. The main feature of the minimal binding energy is the inclination of the surface energy to generate a ball and the tendency of the Coulomb repulsion energy to avoid the ball via the fact that the ball maximizes the Coulomb energy with a mass constraint. In this way, the existence is not in general anticipated true for any mass yielding the non-existence of nuclei with a large atomic number. In the talk, I will discuss my recent theorems on the anisotropic minimization and my explicit mass interval for non-existence.