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Two up quarks and one down quark are in motion. Credit: Brianzero/Wikimedia Commons.
University of Adelaide experts may have come across a new paradigm for the way atomic nuclei are built.
Professor Anthony Thomas is the Elder Professor of Physics at the University of Adelaide and he said that they have been working on the theoretical analysis of an amazing experiment, Marathon, which took 20 years from conception to publication.
The aim was to measure the distribution of quarks as a function of momentum.
A quark is an elementary particle. Up quarks, down quarks and electrons make up most of the observable matter.
Professor Thomas said that understanding how quarks work in relation to a protons's momentum is a fundamental property which has never been measured before.
The fundamental theory of the strong force is tested.
All the forces of nature can be traced back to four fundamental forces. Particles decay and objects interact with them.
The Marathon experiment collected valuable information about quarks and the nature of matter during its 20 year lifespan which contributed to insights from other work carried out by physicists around the world at the time.
An important new insight into how nuclei are built has been yielded by the Marathon experiment.
The question of whether atomic nuclei are built of protons and neutrons or of quasi-particles with quantum numbers of neutrons and protons is a fundamental unanswered question in nuclear physics.
Evidence for such changes was provided by an experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in the 1980s.
A decade ago, Professor Thomas and a colleague in Japan collaborated on a project that suggested a new way in which quarks behaved.
Professor Thomas said that their work suggested that in a nucleus with equal numbers of protons and neutrons, the change in the momentum distributions of up and down quarks would be different.
The first experimental hint for the existence of the isovector EMC effect was provided by our analysis of the Marathon data that we started 20 years ago.
"It will certainly inspire a lot of further experimental effort, which ultimately will tell us whether we really do have a new paradigm for the way atomic nuclei are built."
Professor Thomas's paper was published in a journal.
C. Cocuzza et al. have a paper on the effect of global qcd analysis with maraTHON data. There is a book titled "PhysRevLett. 127. 242001."
Journal information: Physical Review Letters.
The marathon experiment reveals quirks of quarks.
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