OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — Examining the smallest parts of the universe often takes the biggest kinds of equipment. At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a unique piece of equipment the size of a building is ...

Physicists working with molybdenum-84, a nucleus containing exactly 42 protons and 42 neutrons, have found that this seemingly balanced atom defies one of nuclear physics’ longest-standing ...

If you hit an atom’s nucleus hard enough, it will fall apart. But exactly how it falls apart tells us something about the internal structure of the nucleus and perhaps about the interior of neutron ...

According to the classical model of nuclear structure, the internal structure of nucleons should not change if they are bound into atomic nuclei. But it was discovered 35 years ago that quarks inside ...

There’s a pencil lying on my desk right now. It’s not much to look at, but what if I could zoom way in and see the protons and other itty-bitty stuff inside it? My friend Ryan Corbin told me it would ...

A new measurement of the strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together, confirms previous hints of an uncomfortable truth: We still don’t have a solid theoretical grasp of even the ...

A few years ago, a novel measurement technique showed that protons are probably smaller than had been assumed since the 1990s. The discrepancy surprised the scientific community; some researchers even ...

Figure 2: Dependence of an electron’s drift path on its altitude and L shell. Figure 3: Electron flux as a function of longitude in different L shells for the period 7–10 October 2012. Figure 4: ...

HEISENBERG has discussed the hypothesis that the nucleus of an atom is composed of neutrons and protons only, the neutron being regarded as a fundamental entity and not as a combination of an electron ...

While protons populate the nucleus of every atom in the universe, sometimes they can be squeezed into a smaller size and slip out of the nucleus for a romp on their own. Observing these squeezed ...