Inside the most powerful particle colliders on Earth, protons slam together at nearly the speed of light, shredding matter ...

Proton collisions at the LHC appear wildly chaotic, but new data reveal a surprising underlying order. The findings confirm that a basic rule of quantum mechanics holds true even in extreme particle ...

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

The universe we live in and everything in it burst into existence roughly 13.8 billion years ago. In its infancy, the cosmos was filled with a dense primordial “soup” of quark-gluon plasma, which, as ...

Researchers have been working for decades to understand the architecture of the subatomic world. One of the knottier questions has been where the proton gets its intrinsic angular momentum, otherwise ...

What does quark-gluon plasma -- the hot soup of elementary particles formed a few microseconds after the Big Bang -- have in common with tap water? Scientists say it's the way it flows. What does ...

New data from particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), an "atom smasher" at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, reveals how the primordial ...

Comparing the number of direct photons emitted when proton spins point in opposite directions (top) with the number emitted when protons collide head-to-tail (bottom) revealed that gluon spins align ...

Researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory's RHIC particle accelerator have determined that an exotic form of matter produced in their collisions is the most rapidly spinning material ever detected ...

Physicists have known for decades that particles called gluons keep protons and neutrons intact—and thereby hold the universe together. Yet the details of how gluons function remain surprisingly ...