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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A research team led by Rice University physicist Frank Geurts has successfully measured the temperature of quark-gluon plasma ...

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 ...

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 ...

Neutron stars, these cosmic remnants resulting from the catastrophic explosion of massive stars, represent one of the most ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...