A boiling sea of quarks and gluons, including virtual ones—this is how we can imagine the main phase of high-energy proton ...

Stephen has degrees in science (Physics major) and arts (English Literature and the History and Philosophy of Science), as well as a Graduate Diploma in Science Communication. Stephen has degrees in ...

Protons might be stretchier than they should be. The subatomic particles are built of smaller particles called quarks, which are bound together by a powerful interaction known as the strong force. New ...

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has shed light on the structure of "exotic" particles. These particles ...

New theory work at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility has shown that more than half of the spin of the proton is the result of the movement of its building ...

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 ...

Deep in the heart of the matter, some numbers don't add up. For example, while protons and neutrons are made of quarks, ...

Objects are made of atoms, and atoms are likewise the sum of their parts—electrons, protons, and neutrons. Dive into one of those protons or neutrons, however, and things get weird. Three particles ...

The three valence quarks of a proton contribute to its spin, but so do the gluons, sea quarks and antiquarks, and orbital angular momentum as well. The electrostatic repulsion and the attractive ...

Is there a time of day or night at which nature's heaviest elementary particle stops obeying Einstein's rules? The answer to that question, as bizarre as it seems, could tell scientists something very ...

While the Higgs mechanism was confirmed by the Large Hadron Collider—leading to the 2013 Nobel Prize—it fails to account for ...