A photon inside a proton can collide with a temporary complex of gluons, whose color charges (here shown in red, green and blue) can be collectively neutralized. When a high-energy photon strikes a ...

The proton sounds like a simple object, but it's not. Inside, there's a teeming microcosm of quarks and gluons with properties such as spin and "color" charge that contribute to the particle's ...

The proton, one of the building blocks for all matter, has a variable size depending on how you look at it. If you are looking at its charge, it will have one radius, but if you look at its mass, you ...

The internal structure of a proton, with quarks, gluons, and quark spin shown. The nuclear force acts like a spring, with negligible force when unstretched but large, attractive forces when stretched ...

Protons are no one-trick ponies. Although famous for their positive electric charge, the particles also carry an analogous, lesser-known charge, called the weak charge. Now, physicists have made the ...