For a mere moment after the Big Bang, no neutrons or protons are thought to have existed. These neutral and positively ...

At Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider has powered down for the last time, ending operations at the only particle collider still running in the United ...

When the universe first burst into being, all of space was a cosmic cauldron filled with a roiling, fiery liquid of ...

The famed collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory has ended operations, but if all goes to plan, a new collider will rise ...

After 25 years, Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider—the U.S.’s largest particle collider—has ...

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 ...

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 ...

Quantum physics paints a strange picture of the world, one filled with spooky connections, unsettling uncertainties ...

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 ...

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.