Discovery of doubly magic nickel

An experiment at the French GANIL laboratory has recently discovered a new "doubly magic" nucleus-only the tenth such isotope known to science. A collaboration of French, Polish and Romanian physicists began an experiment at GANIL in Caen, France, to search for nickel-48, the last doubly magic nucleus accessible with present methods. A primary beam of nickel-58 with an average intensity of 10 /sup 12/ ions per second and an energy of 95 MeV per nucleon hit a natural nickel target in the superconducting solenoids of the SISSI device. The proton-rich projectile fragments were selected by the USE3 separator and finally identified by their time of flight, their energy loss and their total energy in a detection set-up consisting of a microchannel plate detector and a stack of five silicon detectors. This allowed the measurement of 10 independent parameters to identify each fragment arriving at the focal plane. (0 refs).