database

1228 isotopes, 5800 entries later

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 😉

An update to the nuclear moments database

The nuclear moments database is sponsored and hosted by the IAEA Nuclear Data Section.
See the latest official release here:
http://www-nds.iaea.org/nuclearmoments

This is a major update with cutoff date 30.06.2016. The next is scheduled for 30.09.2016.

On the parallel, on the development server (always on beta status) http://data.magneticmoments.info
a new database is being tested that additionally includes nuclear charge radii and nuclear masses (in fact mass excess values).
This database is currently in sync with the IAEA servers, but will eventually branch out (early next year).

My recommendation is to follow the official releases on IAEA web if you want to use it in a paper (please cite the database using the citations listed in the server). If you can’t wait for the official release, try the development server, where more features are and will be available as the site expands.

Typos, comments or missing values? PLEASE let me know about it (thanks in advance!)
The blog is also there for more resources http://magneticmoments.info/wp

An update of the nuclear moments update: masses and charge radii

For those of you who are following my blog or twitter feed, what I am about to say is not quite new. I have already made a comment a couple of weeks ago regarding the last update of the database I administer. The database contains non-evaluated, experimentally deduced values of nuclear magnetic dipole and electric quadrupole moments. The official release of the database is hosted on IAEA servers and they are responsible for the dissemination of the information included to the world’s nuclear community. However, I keep a test server available for updates and testing new ideas before they appear on the IAEA’s website. This URL is http://magneticmoments.info/data

As I said earlier, a couple of weeks ago I have managed to find the time and upgrade the database with two important observables that people have requested in the recent past. The first one is masses, while the second one is nuclear charge radii. The former is listed in each isotope selected in the database in the form of mass excess Δm (=mass-A). Please notice I do not provide the whole table maintained by the Chinese colleagues (latest AME2012). Rather, I use it as an associate value to the spectroscopic values included when an isotope is selected.

The nuclear charge radii on the other hand is a new addition to the database and I intend to keep updating regardless the official releases (in print format) by IAEA or any other source. The radii are important structure information and as such they will be treated with extra care during each upgrade.

Besides these two extensive updates, lifetimes, spins and parities are slowly being synced with the evaluated data existing in the ENSDF.

You spot a problem or have something to say about the database, please let me know.