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

Nature is the ultimate puzzle player, as scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) found out last week. In the late 1950s, particle physics was in crisis. Being the branch of ...

For decades, physicists have relied on the principle of symmetry to simplify and understand the complex behaviors of subatomic particles. Symmetry in physics basically means that some rules of nature ...

Probing ever deeper into the inner world of the atom, nuclear physicists have uncovered an increasingly baffling collection of tiny particles. Besides the familiar neutrons, electrons and protons, ...

The strong nuclear force is the force that causes quarks to bind together to form composite particles, such as the proton. It is explained within the standard model of particle physics by a theory ...

Quarks make up all matter, but have never been seen by themselves. And they have “flavors” and “colors” — though neither term has any relevance to what they actually do. Let’s take a look at why we ...

Nowadays physicists are confident in their knowledge of nature’s ultimate bits of matter. A handful of building blocks can be easily summarized in a neat little chart. But merely half a century ago, ...

Quarks are found in protons and are bound together by forces which cause all other known forces of nature to fade. To understand the effects of these strong forces between the quarks is one of the ...

As they probe deeper into the heart of the atom, discovering ever smaller and more mysterious particles and particles within particles, scientists have succeeded in bringing the once stable world of ...

So there are these things called quarks. (I know, I wish they had a better name, but I'm not in charge of naming things in physics.) Quarks are little teensy tiny particles (we'll get to exactly how ...