Last Friday, 28.10, was a National Holiday here in Greece, our OXI! day (“No!” day in english), the 76th anniversary of the beginning of WWII in Greece, after Italy’s attack on the NW border with Albania. It is always a nice holiday as kids and grown ups don’t go to school and people grab the opportunty to do something nice, weather permitted, which is more or less the truth since October has been generous with sunlight and medium temperatures the recent years.
For my account, I chose to revisit a favorite land, an exciting land, the land of isotopes. You might know already or have concluded from visiting this page that I maintain a database of nuclear electromagnetic moments, which is rather unique worldwide and has been an integral part of the IAEA Nuclear Data Section for over a year now (this is the moment you should appllaud people!). I spent my OXI break updating the database, which at the beginning of the week seemed easy, but in the end resulted in a very difficult task as I have found several typos, mistakes in the values and losses of format integrity inherited from previous printed compilations. The proofing is a very difficult job and one has to do it carefully at the very beginning, else there is always the risk to transmit -eternally- wrong information. And I wouldn’t like to think I have the wrong value of the proton magnetic moment when I get my next MRI exam…
All in all, the database has now 1228 isotopes spanning a set of 5800 entries of magnetic dipole and electric quadrupole moments. Both numbers are larger if you include the nuclear charge radii that now exist only in the development server together with nuclear masses and X-ray data. This version will be updated fully after the AME2016 will be published, word says some time in this coming December.
Despite the “self-confinement” on a chair inside a room with tons of tea and coffee, my OXI day weekend has been both fruitful and joyous. But next time I will pick a different destination 😉
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