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Updated: Jun 30, 2025

Neutron Crystallography Data Collection and Processing for Modelling Hydrogen Atoms in Protein Structures
Published on: December 1, 2020
μeV-Deep Neutron Bound States in Nanocrystals
Hao Tang1, Guoqing Wang2,3,4, Paola Cappellaro2,3,4
1Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, United States.
Abstract:
The strong nuclear force gives rise to the widely studied neutron scattering states and MeV-energy nuclear bound states. Whether this same interaction could lead to low-energy bound states for a neutron in the nuclear force field of a cluster of nuclei is an open question. Here, we computationally demonstrate the existence of μeV-level neutronic bound states originating from the strong interactions in nanocrystals with a spatial extent of tens of nanometers. These negative-energy neutron wave functions depend on the size, dimension, and nuclear spin polarization of the nanoparticles, providing engineering degrees of freedom for the artificial neutronic "molecule".
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