From matching wings on butterflies to the repeating six-point pattern of snowflakes, symmetries echo through nature, even down to the smallest building blocks of matter. Since the discovery of quarks, ...

A new facility opens for experiments in SLAC’s historic End Station A, where the first evidence for quarks was discovered. Electrons are once again streaming into SLAC’s End Station A, setting the ...

Probing ever deeper into the inner world of the atom, nuclear physicists have uncovered an increasingly baffling collection of tiny particles. Besides the familiar neutrons, electrons and protons, ...

After years of research and analysis, nuclear physicists at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility have discovered how something strange can come from the ordinary. The physicists have ...

If there were no Higgs mechanism, what a different world it would be! Elementary particles of matter such as quarks and electrons would have no mass. Yet that does not mean the universe would contain ...

A new measurement by CERN’s ATLAS Collaboration has strengthened evidence that the masses of fundamental particles originate through their interaction with the Higgs field. Building on earlier results ...

As they probe deeper into the heart of the atom, discovering ever smaller and more mysterious particles and particles within particles, scientists have succeeded in bringing the once stable world of ...

The observable universe is estimated to contain about 10 53 kilograms of ordinary matter, most of that in the form of some 10 80 protons and neutrons, which, along with electrons, are the ingredients ...

The world's most advanced particle accelerator for investigating the quark structure of the atom's nucleus has just charmed physicists with a new capability. The production of charm quarks in J/psi ...

A recent experiment at Jefferson Lab probed the mirror symmetry of quarks, determining that one of their intrinsic properties is non-zero—as predicted by the Standard Model. From matching wings on ...