Thanks to a unique analysis of experimental data, nuclear physicists have made a groundbreaking discovery. For the first time in history, they observed the formation of lambda particles, also known as “strange matter,” using a process called semi-scope deep inelastic scattering (SIDIS). The findings also suggest that the building blocks of protons, quarks and gluons can sometimes pass through the nucleus of an atom in pairs called diquarks. The experiment was conducted at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, operated by the US Department of Energy.

This achievement was the culmination of many years of hard work. The data used in this study were first collected in 2004. Lamia El Fassi, now an assistant professor of physics at Mississippi State University and the project’s principal investigator, first analyzed the data as part of her thesis project for her master’s degree in a different subject.

Almost a decade after El Fassi completed his initial study of these data, he revisited the dataset and put his group through rigorous analysis to derive these unprecedented metrics. The dataset was derived from experiments at the Jefferson Lab Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF), a DOE user facility. During the experiment, nuclear physicists watched what happens when electrons from CEBAF scatter from a target nucleus and studied confined quarks inside protons and neutrons. Results published recently Physical Review Letters .

“These studies help establish a movie-like story of how a wounded quark transforms into hadrons. In the new paper, we report the first observations of such a study for lambda baryons in the forward and backward fragmentation regions,” said El Fassi.