In possibly the first mother–son scientific collaboration, Gertrude Scharff‐Goldhaber (Brookhaven) and Alfred S. Goldhaber (Stony Brook) have suggested that in singly or doubly magic even–even nuclei there is a change in the nucleus resembling a first‐order phase transition, such as occurs when a superconductor goes normal. This change or rearrangement occurs between the 0+ ground state and a band of excited states 2+,4+,6+, and so on. The remarkable point, in the authors' view, is not the existence of this phase transition, but rather that all other even–even nuclei exhibit a single phase in which the ground state is part of a quasi‐rotational band.

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