For a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, the universe consisted of a hot soup of elementary particles called quarks and gluons. A few microseconds later, those particles began cooling to ...

The strong nuclear force may abruptly loosen its grip on the fundamental particles that make up matter at a special “critical ...

For a quarter of a century, physicists have faced a paradox regarding the net spin of protons and neutrons – the spin of their constituent quarks accounts for only a small fraction of their overall ...

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 ...

The three valence quarks of a proton contribute to its spin, but so do the gluons, sea quarks and antiquarks, and orbital angular momentum as well. The electrostatic repulsion and the attractive ...

The primordial soup of matter that existed only split-seconds after the Big Bang is now getting recreated in the most powerful particle colliders in the world. Such research could not only help shed ...

What happens when the smallest building blocks of matter refuse to play by the rules of traditional physics? For decades, atomic nuclei have posed a stubborn puzzle: at low energies, they appear as ...

LAWRENCE -- A team of high-energy nuclear experimental particle physicists from the University of Kansas has earned a two-year, $400,000 Department of Energy (DoE) grant to investigate strong ...

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 ...

New data from particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), an "atom smasher" at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, reveals how the primordial ...

The early Universe was a strange place. The Universe was so dense and hot that atoms and nuclei could not form—they would be ripped apart by high-energy collisions. Even protons and neutrons could not ...

All the matter we know of in the Universe is made up of Standard Model particles. Photons and neutrinos zip through the Universe all the time, far outnumbering all the other particles. Normal, ...