She explains to Popular Mechanics how charm quarks could be connected to proton structure and how the intrinsic charm quark scenario differs from the standard scenario that sees protons comprised of just two up and one down quarks joined by gluons. Romona Vogt is a high-energy physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, who wrote a “News and Views” piece for Nature to accompany the new research paper. “This is quantum physics, so everything is probabilistic.” The “Intrinsic” Charm Quark Scenario “You have a chance, which is small but not negligible, of finding a charm quark in the proton, and when you do find one, it so happens that that charm quark is typically carrying about half of the proton mass,” Forte says on the podcast. These are labeled “intrinsic” because they are part of the proton for a long time and are still present when the proton is at rest, meaning it doesn’t emerge from the high-energy interaction with another particle. This resulted in the first evidence that protons do indeed sometimes have charm quarks. From here, the team calculated the structure for the proton when it is at rest. This can be used to “reconstruct” the composition of the original particle and the particles that comprised it , collectively known as “partons.”Įach of these partons carries away a portion of the overall momentum of the system - the momentum distribution-with this share of momentum known as the momentum fraction.įorte and colleagues fed 35 years of data from particle accelerators, including the world’s largest and most powerful machine of this kind, the LHC, to a computer algorithm that pieces proton structure back together by looking for a “best fit” for its structure at high-energies. When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and other particle accelerators smash protons against each other (and other particles, like electrons) at high energies, what emerges is a shower of particles.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |