The internal structure of a proton, with quarks, gluons, and quark spin shown. The nuclear force acts like a spring, with negligible force when unstretched but large, attractive forces when stretched ...

One of the great theoretical challenges facing physicists is understanding how the tiniest elementary particles give rise to most of the mass in the visible universe. A physicist from MIT will talk ...

The LHC paper I've been working on for the past few months is finally out. It shows quarks and gluons doing what they should do, and I love it In July we (ATLAS) released a preliminary version of our ...

An atom is about 10^-10 m in size. The next smallest thing in nature is the nucleus, which is about 100,000 times smaller, i.e., 10^-15 m in size — a femtometer, or “fermi.” A nucleus is composed of ...

"These results confirm our suspicion that a lot of the gluons' contribution to proton spin comes from the gluons with relatively low momentum," said Ralf Seidl, a physicist from the RIKEN-BNL Research ...

A team of physicists has embarked on a journey where few others have gone: into the glue that binds atomic nuclei. The resultant measurement, which was extracted from experimental data taken at the ...

The big idea of atomic theory is that, at some smallest, fundamental level, the matter that makes up everything can be divided no further. Those ultimate building blocks would be literally ἄ-τομος, or ...

Comparing the number of direct photons emitted when proton spins point in opposite directions (top) with the number emitted when protons collide head-to-tail (bottom) revealed that gluon spins align ...

Researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s RHIC particle accelerator have determined that an exotic form of matter produced in their collisions is the most rapidly spinning material ever detected ...

GlueX The spectrometer at Jefferson Lab was used to study the behaviour of gluons within nuclei. (Courtesy: Jefferson Lab/Aileen Devlin) A new experiment has offered the clearest view yet of how ...