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Are there individual protons and neutrons in a nucleus?
The popular science material always talks about the number of protons and neutrons in a nucleus, but I've always wondered if that's a real thing nuclear physicists believe or if it is just a conven...
The different term symbols are allowed because, due to so-called "spin-orbit" interactions, it's only approximately correct to treat the spin and orbital quantum numbers $S$ and $L$ as being conserved separately. Anything that produces a fragment of a nucleus could be interpreted in either of two ways: a certain number of protons and neutrons broke off of the clump, or the single particle divided into separate pieces. The popular science material always talks about the number of protons and neutrons in a nucleus, but I've always wondered if that's a real thing nuclear physicists believe or if it is just a convenient model.
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