Nuclear Stability and Nucleon−Nucleon Interactions in Introductory and General Chemistry Textbooks

Abstract

The nucleus is a highly dense and highly charged substructure of atoms. In the nuclei of all atoms beyond hydrogen, multiple protons are in close proximity to each other in spite of strong electrostatic repulsions between them. The attractive internucleon strong force is described and its origin explained by using a simple quark model for the proton and neutron.