There’s a pencil lying on my desk right now. It’s not much to look at, but what if I could zoom way in and see the protons and other itty-bitty stuff inside it? My friend Ryan Corbin told me it would ...

A proton’s valence quarks (blue, red, and green), quark-antiquark pairs, and gluons (springs). Scalar gluon activity (pink) extends beyond the electric charge radius (orange) that surrounds the ...

A collaboration of nuclear theorists has used supercomputers to predict the spatial distributions of charges, momentum, and other properties of 'up' and 'down' quarks within protons. The calculations ...

Scientists working on CERN’s ALICE experiment have reported the first observation of a distinctive flow pattern among quarks in proton-proton collisions, a signal long associated with quark-gluon ...

A view inside a proton moving at nearly the speed of light toward the viewer with its spin pointing horizontally shows differences in the spatial distributions of the momentum of up (left) and down ...

Physics at the smallest scales is a challenge of observation: Particles are often fleeting, and the forces that govern their behavior are nearly imperceptible. But now, by exploiting decades-old data ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Physicists have begun to explore the proton as if it were a subatomic planet. Cutaway maps display newfound details of the particle’s ...

This graphic illustrates a proton moving at nearly the speed of light toward the viewer with its spin aligned along the horizontal direction (large arrow). The two views of concentric circles at the ...