Physicists have known for decades that particles called gluons keep protons and neutrons intact—and thereby hold the universe together. Yet the details of how gluons function remain surprisingly ...

Inside high-energy proton collisions, quarks and gluons briefly form a dense, boiling state before cooling into ordinary ...

Combinations of three quarks (RGB) or three antiquarks (CMY) are colorless, as are appropriate combinations of quark/antiquark pairs. The gluon exchanges that keep these entities stable are quite ...

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 ...

These force-carrying particles are the glue that binds baryonic matter together. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Gluons are ...

"These results confirm our suspicion that a lot of the gluons' contribution to proton spin comes from the gluons with relatively low momentum," said Ralf Seidl, a physicist from the RIKEN-BNL Research ...

A team of physicists say they have created the first coherent picture of atomic nuclei from their composite particles, quarks and gluons. The 20th century was a pretty busy hundred years for particle ...

An unusual alliance between physicists who study ultrahot plasmas and ultracold atoms is yielding intriguing results – and may even lead to an experimental test for string theory, as Barbara Jacak ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...