Hadrons are composite physical systems consisting of quarks bound together by gluons via the non-Abelian SU(3) color gauge interaction of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). They are color-neutral and fall into two main classes: baryons, composed of three valence quarks (qqq), and mesons, composed of a quark–antiquark pair (q\bar{q}). Their structure is governed by confinement, asymptotic freedom, and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking, leading to rich spectra of resonances and internal parton distributions. Hadrons dominate strongly interacting matter, determine the properties of nuclear systems, and serve as primary probes of QCD in both perturbative and nonperturbative regimes.
For decades, a theory in physics has postulated the existence of a mirror world whose interaction with our own reality is extremely feeble. The particles in this mirror universe are also thought to be candidates for dark ...
General Physics
Jul 28, 2026
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Deep beneath the French-Swiss border, the world's largest scientific instrument has fallen silent. After years of smashing protons together at nearly the speed of light, CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has stopped operations ...
General Physics
Jul 17, 2026
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Scientists studying particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) usually capture what happens when atomic nuclei smash into one another at nearly the speed of light. But even when the nuclei don't collide, ...
General Physics
Jun 17, 2026
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A team of researchers has leveraged a supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory to reveal the internal structure of a pion in unprecedented detail. The findings are published in the ...
General Physics
Jun 13, 2026
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Protons and neutrons—the building blocks of matter—belong to a huge class of particles called hadrons. Hadrons are composite particles made of quarks that are bound together by the strong force. They are classified into two ...
General Physics
May 26, 2026
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Nearly every object we interact with in our lives has a mass, but where does this mass come from? Modern physics says matter acquires its mass from interaction with a physical vacuum—it is not an empty space, but contains ...
General Physics
Apr 7, 2026
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Particle accelerators reveal the heart of nuclear matter by smashing together atoms at close to the speed of light. The high-energy collisions produce a shower of subatomic fragments that scientists can then study to reconstruct ...
General Physics
Mar 26, 2026
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A new independent measurement by the CMS experiment at the LHC is consistent with the existence of the most massive composite particle ever observed, the momentary union of a top quark and its antiquark
General Physics
Mar 26, 2026
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Scientists in Geneva took some antiprotons out for a spin—a very delicate one—in a truck, in a never-tried-before test drive that has been deemed a success.
General Physics
Mar 24, 2026
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Scientists in Geneva are taking some antiprotons out for a spin—a very delicate one—in a truck, in a never-tried-before test drive.
General Physics
Mar 24, 2026
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