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 ...

When the Nobel Prize-winning US physicist Robert Hofstadter and his team fired highly energetic electrons at a small vial of hydrogen at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1956, they opened the ...

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 ...

Probing ever deeper into the inner world of the atom, nuclear physicists have uncovered an increasingly baffling collection of tiny particles. Besides the familiar neutrons, electrons and protons, ...

Nuclear physicists may have finally pinpointed where in the proton a large fraction of its mass resides. A recent experiment carried out at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National ...

As they probe deeper into the heart of the atom, discovering ever smaller and more mysterious particles and particles within particles, scientists have succeeded in bringing the once stable world of ...

Theoretical calculations involving the strong force are complex. One aspect of this complexity arises because there are many ways to perform these calculations. Scientists refer to some of these as ...

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 ...

Protons make up most of the visible universe. Now, in a new study published in the August 18 issue of the journal Nature, scientists find that because of the strange nature of quantum physics, protons ...

Every form of matter that we know of in the Universe is made up of the same few fundamental particles: the quarks, leptons and bosons of the Standard Model. Quarks and leptons bind together to form ...