Maria Goeppert Mayer

Maria Goeppert Mayer helped explain nuclear magic numbers using a nuclear shell model with strong spin-orbit coupling. Coupling a nucleon's orbital angular momentum $\ell$ and spin $1/2$ gives levels with $j=\ell \pm 1/2$ and different energies. A large splitting changes the order and capacity of the shells, producing closures that a simple central potential alone fails to explain. For example, lowering the $j=7/2$ member of an $f$ level supplies eight states, accounting for the step from the closure at $20$ to the one at $28$.^[ref]

A physicist.^[ref]