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.
A boiling sea of quarks and gluons, including virtual ones—this is how we can imagine the main phase of high-energy proton collisions. It would seem that particles here have significantly more opportunities to evolve than ...
General Physics
Dec 4, 2025
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Deep in the heart of the matter, some numbers don't add up. For example, while protons and neutrons are made of quarks, nature's fundamental building blocks bound together by gluons, their masses are much larger than the ...
General Physics
Nov 18, 2025
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The experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) detect rare events on a daily basis, but some are exceptionally rare, such as this latest result from the CMS collaboration. For the first time, the collaboration has observed ...
General Physics
Nov 3, 2025
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For the first time, by studying quantum correlations between triplets of secondary particles created during high-energy collisions in the LHC accelerator, it has been possible to observe their coherent production. This achievement ...
General Physics
Oct 16, 2025
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254
The small but ubiquitous proton serves as a foundation for the bulk of the visible matter in the universe. It abides at the very heart of matter, giving rise to everything we see around us as it anchors the nuclei of atoms. ...
General Physics
Sep 11, 2025
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137
Baryons, composite particles made up of three quarks bound together via the so-called strong force, make up the most visible matter and have thus been the focus of numerous physics studies. Studying the rare processes via ...
Usually, light waves can pass through each other without any resistance. According to the laws of electrodynamics, two light beams can exist in the same place without influencing each other; they simply overlap. Light saber ...
Optics & Photonics
Jul 28, 2025
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90
In a breakthrough for antimatter research, the BASE collaboration at CERN has kept an antiproton—the antimatter counterpart of a proton—oscillating smoothly between two different quantum states for almost a minute while trapped. ...
Quantum Physics
Jul 23, 2025
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A rather unassuming particle is playing an important role in the hunt for subatomic oddities. Similar to protons and neutrons, mesons are composed of quarks bound together by the strong nuclear force. But these short-lived ...
General Physics
Jul 18, 2025
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The first-known observations of matter–antimatter asymmetry in a decaying composite subatomic particle that belongs to the baryon class are reported from the LHCb experiment located at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. This ...
General Physics
Jul 16, 2025
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