At the heart of every atom in the universe is a whirlwind of particles that physicists are trying to understand. No probe, no microscope, and no X-ray machine can make sense of the chaotic blur of quantum teeth whirling inside an atom, forcing physicists to theorize as best they can based on the debris of high-speed collisions in particle colliders.

Now researchers have a new tool that gives a little insight into the protons and neutrons that make up the atomic nucleus, based on the entanglement of particles that form as gold atoms pass each other.

Using the powerful Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, scientists have demonstrated how precise details of the positions of gold protons and neutrons can be obtained using a kind of quantum interference never before seen in an experiment.

“This technique is similar to how doctors use positron emission tomography (PET scans) to see what’s going on inside the brain and other parts of the body,” says physicist James Daniel Brandenburg, a former Brookhaven researcher and now a member of the STAR collaboration. .

“But in this case, we’re talking about mapping properties on the femtometer scale — one quadrillionth of a meter — the size of an individual proton.”

In textbook terms, the anatomy of a proton can be described as a trio of fundamental building blocks, called quarks, bound together by the exchange of a force particle called a gluon.

If we were to zoom in and observe this collaboration firsthand, we wouldn’t see anything so wonderful. Particles and antiparticles appear and disappear in the boiling foam of statistical madness, where the rules of particle distribution are not at all consistent.

It takes some clever thinking to impose constraints on the motions and momentum of quarks and gluons, but what physicists really want is tangible proof. Unfortunately, simply illuminating a proton will not produce a snapshot of its moving parts. Photons and gluons act according to very different rules, that is, they are effectively invisible to each other. Source