Jefferson Lab: Mapping out matter’s building blocks in 3D
Summary
September 17, 2024 | W&M physics researchers "turn to supercomputers to help build a 3D picture of the structures of protons and neutrons"
Full Description
Featured excerpt, by Joe McClain for Jefferson Lab:
"Deep inside what we perceive as solid matter, the landscape is anything but stationary. The interior of the building blocks of the atom’s nucleus — particles called hadrons that a high school student would recognize as protons and neutrons — are made up of a seething mixture of interacting quarks and gluons, known collectively as partons.
A group of physicists has now come together to map out these partons and disentangle how they interact to form hadrons. Based at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and known as the HadStruc Collaboration, these nuclear physicists have been working on a mathematical description of the interactions of partons. Their latest findings were recently published in the Journal of High Energy Physics.
The William & Mary Department of Physics is represented by Hervé Dutrieux, Christopher Monahan and Kostas Orginos, who also has a joint position at Jefferson Lab."
