One of the subatomic particles that make up an atom's nucleus is the proton. Protons are incredibly tiny, but even more so are the quarks that make them up. Quarks come in several "flavors," or varieties, including up, down, weird, charm, bottom, and top. A proton is typically believed to be composed of two up quarks and one down quark.
But according to recent research, it's more complicated
than that. A charm quark, an elementary particle 1.5 times as massive as the
proton itself, may also be found in protons. Stranger still, even when the
charm quark is present in the proton, the heavy particle only bears roughly
half of the proton's mass.
The discovery is entirely based on the probabilistic realm of
quantum physics. Despite being hefty, the charm quark has a low probability of
being in a proton, thus its large mass and low probability essentially cancel
each other out. In other words, even if the charm quark is there, the proton
doesn't absorb the entire mass of the quark, according to a story from Science
News.
Protons are exceedingly intricate while being vital to the
construction of atoms, which constitute all matter. The underlying makeup of
protons is unknown to physicists. According to quantum physics, protons might
occasionally include quarks other than the up and down ones that are known to
be present, according to Stefano Forte of the University of Milan. Forte was
speaking on the podcast Nature Briefing (opens in new tab). A new study
demonstrating the charm quark in protons was co-authored by Forte and released
in the journal Nature on August 17.
The different quarks kinds are six. There are three elements
that are heavier than protons and three that are lighter. To determine if a
proton might carry a quark heavier than itself, physicists opted to start with
the charm quark because it is the lightest of the heavy batch. They
accomplished this by applying a fresh perspective to 35 years' worth of
particle-smashing data.
At particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider, the
largest atom smasher in the world, which is located close to Geneva, scientists
hurl particles against each other at breakneck speeds to learn about the
structure of subatomic and elementary particles. These particle-smashing
records, which date back to the 1980s, were acquired by researchers with the
nonprofit NNPDF cooperation. They include illustrations of experiments in which
photons, electrons, muons, neutrinos, and even other protons collided with
protons. Researchers can reassemble the particles' initial state by examining
the collision-related debris.
In the current study, the researchers gave all of this
collision data to a machine-learning system that was programmed to hunt for
patterns without considering the potential appearance of the structures.
Possible structures and their chance of existing were returned by the
algorithm.
According to Forte of Nature Briefing, the study showed a
"small but not insignificant" possibility of discovering a charm
quark. The results constitute the "first concrete proof" that the
charm quark may exist, according to Forte, even if the amount of evidence
wasn't sufficient for the researchers to announce the irrefutable discovery of
the charm quark in protons.
Forte said that the proton's structure is significant
because, in order to find new fundamental particles, physicists will need to
find minute discrepancies between what theories predict and what is actually
observed. To do this, exceedingly accurate measurements of subatomic structures
are needed.
The illusive "charm" within a proton still needs additional information, at least for the time being. Future research might be helpful, according to Tim Hobbs, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. Future research could include the Electron-Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, which is slated to be built.
Published first on Live Science.
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