Protons not as "strange" as expected
It's been said that anything worth doing takes time - just ask those scientists involved in what's known as the G-Zero experiment. Nearly two decades ago, an international coterie of
Protons not as "strange" as expected
It's been said that anything worth doing takes time - just ask those scientists involved in what's known as the G-Zero experiment. Nearly two decades ago, an international coterie of more than 100 scientists came together with the goal of pinpointing just how strange the ordinary stuff around us can be. The G-Zero collaboration proposed a precisely tuned survey for ephemeral particles that appear only briefly inside matter. Specifically, they wanted to measure the effect of strange particles in the proton, the sub-atomic particle found deep inside the nucleus of every atom in our universe.
It was a massive undertaking. The full experiment would take more than 15 years to accomplish, with tons of new equipment and exclusive use of one third of Jefferson Lab's experimental space for over two years. In addition, it would benefit from the assistance of nearly 50 undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers and hundreds of support personnel.
Now, the G-Zero experiment is publishing the first of several of papers detailing its final conclusions. Its findings were published in the January 8 issue of Physical Review Letters.
Peeking Into the Proton
It took humankind a full two thousand years from the first recorded suggestion of the atom's existence until one would actually be pried apart for a glimpse inside. Democritus, a Greek philosopher in the third century B.C., spoke of the "a-tom" as the smallest component of matter, from the Greek meaning "cannot be split."
What we now think of as the atom - consisting of a nucleus and its electrons - was first described by John Dalton in the early 1800s. Later that century, scientists found that they could strip electrons out of the atom. Then, in the early twentieth century, they found that the nucleus contained even heavier particles, which were dubbed protons and neutrons.
Fast forward to the 1960s, when theoretical physicists proposed that protons and neutrons have building blocks of their own - particles called quarks. Shortly thereafter, researchers at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory conducted experiments that demonstrated that quarks really did exist.
Decades of research have confirmed tha