I N 2025 A GROUP of theoretical physicists studying the behaviour of fundamental particles called gluons hit a brick wall in their calculations. In search of a fresh perspective, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Comparing the number of direct photons emitted when proton spins point in opposite directions (top) with the number emitted when protons collide head-to-tail (bottom) revealed that gluon spins align ...

Like many scientists, theoretical physicist Andrew Strominger was unimpressed with early attempts at probing ChatGPT, receiving clever-sounding answers that didn't stand up to scrutiny. So he was ...

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 ...

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 ...

One of the great theoretical challenges facing physicists is understanding how the tiniest elementary particles give rise to most of the mass in the visible universe. A physicist from MIT will talk ...

"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 ...