Strange view of particles inside a proton rendered like never before: ScienceAlert

the protons And neutrons Atomic nuclei are made up of three smaller fundamental particles known as quarks.

A new study has now determined unprecedented detail of the distribution of the different types of quark within a protonexpanding our understanding of this extremely important part of the atom.

Although the quantum landscape within protons is a hot mess of quarks and their antiquarks popping in and out of existence, there is a general dominance of “flavors” over the others; Two up-flavor quarks and one down-flavor quark.

Led by theoretical physicist Shohini Bhattacharya of Brookhaven National Laboratory, a team of researchers has now created the highest resolution map yet of the two. Quark flavours.

Our calculations show that the up quark is more uniformly distributed and spreads out over a smaller distance than the down quark. He says Theoretical physicist Swagato Mukherjee, of Brookhaven Lab.

The researchers’ results indicate that the up and down quarks affect the proton differently in terms of internal energy, spin, and various other properties. This, in turn, will help analyze future fundamental physics experiments.

You can think of this as a study of a sack of marbles: the sack is the proton and the quarks are the marbles held loosely in place by force-acting ‘gluon’ particles. The research determined the interactions of these spheres with each other.

A variety of Advanced analytical techniques They were used to bounce back the light scattered back to the particles and to calculate their changes in momentum. Previously, such calculations assumed that changes in momentum would be equal throughout, but the team’s calculations confirmed otherwise.

This allowed them to measure more scattering events with greater precision without increasing computing power. Then they applied their more accurate results to the models to get more insights.

“To get a detailed map, we need to analyze several scattering interactions, which involve different values ​​of the proton’s momentum change,” He says Bhattacharya.

Incredibly, the interactions of the up and down quarks accounted for less than 70 percent of the proton’s (bag) spin. This indicates that gluons play a larger role than previously assumed.

One of the main technologies used was the grid Quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which places quarks on a four-dimensional structure in order to precisely model them with a little help from a supercomputer. All possible interactions are evaluated, and then different possibilities are worked out for each.

In the end, the team was able to map out this bag of marbles with about 10 times greater accuracy than previous efforts. When it comes to doing basic physics like this, a higher resolution can make all the difference.

Scientists are still learning more about quarks and how these fundamental particles lay the foundation for much of what we see in the universe.

Further experiments using the new accounts as a basis for are already planned Continuous electron beam accelerator facility (CEBAF) and electron ion collider (EIC) – Experiments that will look at the foundational laws of nature and matter itself. These experiments should help validate the models produced by this study.

“These two complementary things—theory and experiment—must be combined to get a complete picture of the proton,” He says Physicist Joshua Miller, of Temple University.

Research published in physical review d.