Mysterious Quantum Phenomenon Lets Us Peek Inside an Atom's Heart
Using the powerful Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, scientists have shown how it's possible to glean precise details on the arrangement of gold's protons and neutrons using a kind of quantum interference never before seen in an experiment.
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"But in this case, we're talking about mapping out features on the scale of femtometers – quadrillionths of a meter – the size of an individual proton."
In textbook terms, the anatomy of a proton can be described as a trio of fundamental building blocks called quarks bound together by the exchange of a force-carrying particle called a gluon.
Were we to zoom in and observe this collaboration firsthand, we'd see nothing so neat. Particles and antiparticles pop in and out of existence in a seething foam of statistical madness, where the rules on particle distribution are anything but consistent.
https://www.sciencealert.com/mysterious-quantum-phenomenon-lets-us-peek-inside-an-atoms-heart
Well written article for those concerned with things small. Personally, I think the quantum particles are oscillating backward and forward in time, but what do I know? It's just me, asked for the answer to 2+2 and saying the cube root of 64.
= new reply since forum marked as read
From phys.org:
Left: Scientists use the STAR detector to study gluon distributions by tracking pairs of positive (blue) and negative (magenta) pions ( ? ). These ? pairs come from the decay of a rho particle (purple, ?0) — generated by interactions between photons surrounding one speeding gold ion and the gluons within another passing by very closely without colliding. The closer the angle ( ? ) between either ? and the rho's trajectory is to 90 degrees, the clearer the view scientists get of the gluon distribution. Right/inset: The measured ?+ and ?- particles experience a new type of quantum entanglement. Here's the evidence: When the nuclei pass one another, it's as if two rho particles (purple) are generated, one in each nucleus (gold) at a distance of 20 femtometers. As each rho decays, the wavefunctions of the negative pions from each rho decay interfere and reinforce one another, while the wavefunctions of the positive pions from each decay do the same, resulting in one ?+ and one ?- wavefunction (a.k.a. particle) striking the detector. These reinforcing patterns would not be possible if the ?+ and ?- were not entangled. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory
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To understand how the physicists make these 2D measurements, let's step back to the particle generated by the photon-gluon interaction. It's called a rho, and it decays very quickly—in less than four septillionths of a second—into the ?+ and ?-. The sum of the momenta of those two pions gives physicists the momentum of the parent rho particle—and information that includes the gluon distribution and the photon blurring effect.
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