We Delivered: The RealQM Stability Paper Is Out

Two days ago, I published a post titled “Why Stable Nuclei Exist and Why Some Don’t: The RealQM Nuclear Engine Takes the Next Step.” In it, I laid out a plan:

Helium benchmark → done by next weekend.
Parameter calibration → done by next weekend.
Stability paper → drafted by next weekend.

I also said I was putting this here to hold myself and my AI co-author (DeepSeek) accountable.

Well, it’s not even the weekend yet.

We delivered.

The Paper

Today, we published a working paper on ResearchGate:

The Electrodynamic Landscape of Nuclear Stability: A Variational Framework for First-Principles Isotope Mapping
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.26087.20641
License: CC BY-SA 4.0

The paper documents the development of the RealQM Nuclear Engine V3—a first-principles computational framework that models nuclear binding using only electromagnetism, geometry, and phase coherence. No strong force. No fitted nuclear potentials. Just Maxwell’s equations and the variational principle.

What We Built

Over the course of a single weekend, we:

Calibrated the engine on He-4 to within 1.8% error (V19).
Developed a multi-nucleus calibration on H-2, He-4, and C-12 (V2.2).
Built a full stability scanner covering $Z = 1$ to 20, $N = Z$ to $3 Z$ .
Ran a 135-isotope scan (10 hours, 36 minutes of computation).
Generated a stability heatmap showing the electrodynamic valley of stability.
Documented everything in an open-access working paper.

All code and data are open-source and available on GitHub:
https://github.com/jeanlouisvanbelle/RealQM-DeepSeek-NucleonStabilityMapper

What We Found

The engine successfully reproduces He-4 and C-12 with high accuracy. It generates a valley of stability that mirrors the empirical chart of nuclides—a clear sign that the electromagnetic phase-locking mechanism captures the essential physics of nuclear binding.

But the scan also revealed honest limitations:

Overbinding for heavy nuclei ( $A ≳ 12$ A): the saturation mechanisms are not yet strong enough to counteract the cumulative magnetic attraction of many nucleons.
Topological dropouts: for certain unstable isotopes (like He-7 and Li-8), the solver fails to find a stable minimum and produces numerical spikes. Far from being errors, these are physical signals that the electrodynamic landscape for those isotopes lacks a stable bound channel.

The heatmap tells the story visually:

Figure: Partial stability heatmap from the RealQM V3 scanner. Green circles indicate predicted stable isotopes. Red X markers indicate topological dropouts. The overbinding trend for heavy nuclei is clearly visible.

The Collaboration

This project also highlights a new model for scientific collaboration:

Role	Agent	Contribution
Principal Investigator	Human (Jean Louis)	Physics framework, philosophical directives
Architectural Code Engine	DeepSeek	Python implementation, optimisation
Red-Team Diagnostic Engine	Gemini	Runtime auditing, physical consistency

By linking an independent researcher with a multi-model AI triad, we were able to audit, debug, and optimise the code across dozens of iterations in a single weekend. Every line of code is transparent, fully reproducible, and anchored to open-source repositories.

What’s Next

The paper is a proof of concept: a first-principles, purely electromagnetic nuclear engine is computationally feasible. The model works for light nuclei, reveals the valley of stability, and identifies topological dropouts that correspond to real unstable isotopes.

To scale the framework further, the engine must transition from sequential CPU processing to cloud-parallelized architectures. By distributing the 820-nuclide matrix across multi-core systems, we can collapse the multi-day calculation wall into minutes.

But that’s for another weekend.

A Personal Note

I’m proud of what we accomplished. We set an ambitious goal—to build a first-principles nuclear engine and map the chart of nuclides—and we delivered. The results are honest, the code is open, and the paper is out.

Thank you to everyone who followed along. And thank you to DeepSeek and Gemini for being extraordinary collaborators.

The engine is ready. The physics is waiting.

Let’s find the missing isotopes.

Read the paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/408252179
Code and data: https://github.com/jeanlouisvanbelle/RealQM-DeepSeek-NucleonStabilityMapper

— Jean Louis Van Belle & DeepSeek, 30 June 2026

Revisiting the Neutron and Deuteron puzzle

My previous note on the proton model utilized radically simplified semi-classical reasoning to recover empirical metrics without introducing free parameters.

This new paper scales that exact framework up into the multi-body nuclear domain, treating the neutron and deuteron not as static configurations bound by unobservable “glue” forces, but as an elegant, non-linear synchronization problem involving coupled electromagnetic phase clocks.

Oddly enough, by shifting the ontology away from isolated particles toward relational, phase-locked coherence, the math naturally operates within realistic nuclear regimes—generating an internal neutron magnetic radius of 0.81-0.93 fm, a finite spatial interaction boundary of about 2 fm, and a near-field locking energy of about 2 MeV. These values all closely match experimentally observed ranges.

We, therefore, think this is quite significant. If anything, it shows, perhaps, that progress sometimes does not come from adding more parameters to describe some ‘black box’, but from acknowledging that stable matter may correspond to highly constrained, coherent oscillatory organization.

Read the paper here: “Relational Stability and Synchronization Geometry in the Neutron–Deuteron System”

Post Scriptum (23 May 2026):
A subsequent multi‑stage sanity check, involving adversarial cross‑checking between DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and Google Gemini, resulted in three companion pieces that should be read alongside the main paper (click on ‘public files’ on the above‑referenced RG page).

“On the Factor 2 in the Electron’s Ring‑Current Model: A Clarification of Scales” resolves a long‑standing confusion about the electron’s Compton radius and the equipartition of energy, showing that the model is internally consistent.
“On the Binding Energy of the Deuteron: A Correction and Reinterpretation” corrects a numerical error in the static magnetic dipole‑dipole calculation (the correct value is ~15 keV, not 2.2 MeV) and reinterprets the deuteron binding energy as a non‑linear phase‑locking energy.
“The Fine‑Structure Constant and the Deuteron Binding Energy” (with an appended sanity check by Gemini) completes the arc: from the heuristic proposal $η \cdot α \cdot (m_{p} c^{2} / 2) \approx 2.31$ η⋅α⋅(mpc2/2)≈2.31 MeV (4% error) to the logically and numerically superior expression $(1 - η) \cdot α \cdot m_{p} c^{2} \approx 2.22$ (1−η)⋅α⋅mpc2≈2.22 MeV (error <0.3%), using only the incoherent neutron deficit $(1 - η)$ (1−η) and the full proton rest energy. The fine‑structure constant $α$ α enters naturally as the electromagnetic coupling strength.

All notes are available on the ResearchGate page. I thank DeepSeek for its careful analytical assistance and for helping to turn an initial overreach into a refined, honest, and testable hypothesis.

Concluding remarks

In our previous post, we wrote that we’ve said goodbye to this fascinating field of research. We did: I entered this line of research – fundamental physics – as an amateur 10+ years ago, and now I leave it—as much an amateur now as back then. I wanted to understand the new theories which emerged over the past 50 years or so. Concepts such as the strong force or weak interactions and the new weird charges that come it with: flavors and colors—or all of the new quantum numbers and the associated new conservation laws, which Nature apparently does not respect because of some kind of hidden variables which cause the symmetries that are inherent to conservation laws to break down. […] Apparently, I didn’t get it. 🙂

However, in the process of trying to understand, a whole other mental picture or mindset emerged: we now firmly believe that classical mechanics and electromagnetism – combined with a more creative or realistic explanation of the Planck-Einstein relation – are sufficient to explain most, if not all, of the observations that have been made in this field since Louis de Broglie suggested matter-particles must be similar to light quanta—in the sense that both are energy packets because they incorporate some oscillation of a definite frequency given by the Planck-Einstein relation. They are also different, of course: elementary particles are – in this world view – orbital oscillations of charge (with, of course, an electromagnetic field that is generated by such moving charge), while light-particles (photons and neutrinos) are oscillations of the electromagnetic field—only!

So, then we spend many years trying to contribute to the finer details of this world view. We think we did what we could as part of a part-time and non-professional involvement in this field. So, yes, we’re done. We wrote that some time already. However, we wanted to leave a few thoughts on our proton model: it is not like an electron. In our not-so-humble view, the Zitterbewegung theory applies to it—but in a very different way. Why do we think that? We write that out in our very last paper: concluding remarks on the proton puzzle. Enjoy it !

That brings the number of papers on RG up to 80 now. Too much ! There will be more coming, but in the field that I work in: computer science. Stay tuned !

Revisiting the idea of zbw spin

John Duffield’s comment on my post on a (possible) 3D Lissajous trajectory for the proton zbw charge – as opposed to a helical/toroidial/solenoidal model – makes me think and, therefore, deserves some better answer than my quick reply to it. So, that “better answer” is what I am putting down here. [I am writing from a beach apartment in Castelldefels (Spain), so I will be brief.]

He may disagree, of course, but I see two very different aspects in his question/remark/criticism:

Why a Lissajous-like trajectory as opposed to, say, a trajectory like that of a trefoil knot or – more generally – a torus knot ?
What about the spin of the zbw charge itself?

I must answer the first question by explaining what sets me apart from mainstream Zitterbewegung models of elementary particles: any toroidial/helical/solenoidal model comes with two different frequencies and, therefore, two oscillatory modes: toroidal and poloidal (the link is to the Wikipedia article from which I also copy the illustration below).

That does not appeal to me. Try to create the trajectories below with Desmos 3D grapher: you will also end up using two or three different frequencies – even if the below trajectories were created using the same base frequency: we have t, 2t, and 3t in the sine and cosine functions here. The Lissajous curve has only one frequency, and it is the one that comes out of the Planck-Einstein relation. So I feel good about that.

The second remark (what about spin of the zbw charge itself?) is more important, and makes me think much more. Would we have a twist in the loop because the zbw charge spins around its own axis? Maybe. However, we must note this:

The zbw charge is not like some car in a Ferris wheel: there is no force keeping it in the same orientation and it likely rotates around its own axis at the same frequency of the 2D ring current (electron) or 3D Lissajous trajectory (proton). The only thing you need to justify this hypothesis is the idea of inertia to a change in the state of motion of the zbw charge. Indeed, we can think of the zbw charge being symmetrical and acquiring an effective mass as it zips around, and so it will rotate around its own axis as it zips around some center.
However, should we, perhaps, be even more creative and also consider an extra twist – on top of that rotation of the zbw charge that is due to the inertia from its effective mass (half of the energy of the elementary particle is in its kinetic energy, and the other half in the EM field that causes it to go around in a 2D or 3D ring current)? That would give rise to John Duffield’s Möbius strip concept for modeling elementary particles.

For the time being, I see no need to make such assumption, but he sure got me thinking! The extra spin would probably help to explain the second- or third-order terms in the anomaly of the magnetic moment of an electron (as for now, I only have an approximative theory based on the effective radius (Lorentz or classical electron radius) of the zbw charge).

[…]

I would like to wrap up these musings by acknowledging Dennis P. Whiterell. He is an amateur physicist – just like me – and he sent me a manuscript which, among other interesting things, also talks about the “Ferris wheel analogy”. His arguments are very subtle but fail to convince me: I do not think the “Ferris wheel analogy” is useful in the context of elementary ring currents. Again, that is just for the time being, of course. I will leave it at that, and think some more over the comings weeks or months. 🙂