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 ...

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 ...

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators have a new way to use data from high-energy particle smashups to peer inside protons. Their ...

Physicists have begun to explore the proton as if it were a subatomic planet. Cutaway maps display newfound details of the particle’s interior. The proton’s core features pressures more intense than ...

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 ...

Inside the most powerful particle colliders on Earth, protons slam together at nearly the speed of light, shredding matter into a short‑lived fireball of quarks and gluons. For years, physicists ...

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 ...

What makes up the matter we perceive in the universe? To start, there are the usual suspects, like electrons, protons, quarks and neutrinos. But if those particles aren't strange enough for you, I'm ...

An analysis by physicists of colliding protons is tackling the mystery of where protons get their intrinsic property known as spin. Along with neutrons, protons are housed inside an atom's nucleus.

Nuclear physicists may have finally pinpointed where in the proton a large fraction of its mass resides. A recent experiment has revealed the radius of the proton's mass that is generated by the ...