Can a Nuclear Force Microscope Manipulate Nucleons Within an Existing Nucleus?

[kleinwolf]

Does anybody know if the nuclear force microscope exists, where one could remove or put 1 nucleon at a time into an exisiting nucleus ? (using the same principle as AFM should be too gross...since the tip can not, at my knowledge..be made of one nucleon...maybe an electromagnetic coupling that could transport the nucleon if non neutral...but then how to overcome the coulombic repulsion from the other protons ?

 

[ZapperZ]

No, that doesn't exist. We have no way of isolating the nucleus without the surrounding electrons (both on the material and on the tip) shielding and interfering.

Zz.

 

[kleinwolf]

I thought ions were atoms without a certain number of electron less..until you have no electrons anymore...so could it be possible to ionize a surface (for example with laser beams or other electrical fields?) But then the problem above remains to overcome the coulomb repulsion.

 

[ZapperZ]

I thought ions were atoms without a certain number of electron less..until you have no electrons anymore...so could it be possible to ionize a surface (for example with laser beams or other electrical fields?) But then the problem above remains to overcome the coulomb repulsion.

Which ions?

The "ions" that make up the lattice structure of a material/solid are not fully ionized. In a metal, for example, while the conduction electrons do not actually stay with a particular ion, they still surround and permeate the crystal structure to produce no net charge on average. But each ion site still has all the other remaining electrons fully localized to that nucleus and at that site. It will take a tremendous amount of effort and energy to create a "pseudo-plasma" in a solid.

Zz.

 

[Gokul43201]

Does anybody know if the nuclear force microscope exists, where one could remove or put 1 nucleon at a time into an exisiting nucleus ?

This is impossible (and it doesn't exist ,as Zz's covered). You want to pluck out an individual nucleon from a substrate nucleus, attach this nucleon to a nucleus on the probe tip and deliver this extra nucleon to the substrate at a different location. You are trying to achieve a nuclear transmutation at the tip of an STM-type device ! Do you have any idea of the energy scales involved ? We're talking about the strong-interaction here...not EM forces.

 

[kleinwolf]

Yes...that's why they produce heavy ions only in accelerators...because the energy needed is too high...the alchemists were dissolved a long time ago...or maybe in plasma...but this seems not so well controlled..maybe one day somebody will find how to produce gluon between the ion in the trap and a proton to glue them together...or something that look more controlled than extreme high temperature or acceleration...but thos are the new alchemists...so just forget that