Twenty years ago, physicists began studying a mysterious asymmetry within the proton. It turned out that there was dark matter inside each atomic nucleus that helped to act as a stabilizer. One might never have noticed that part of the positively charged particle inside the nucleus, the proton, is made of dark matter.
We learn from textbooks that protons are made up of three smaller particles, quarks. There are six known flavor states of quarks, including up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange. Each quark also has their corresponding antiparticle.
A common proton generally contains two up quarks and one down quark, each of which has a charge of +2/3 and a charge of -1/3. Together, they have a positive charge of +1. In fact, this is a simplified Perception of scientists to describe an amazing, vast world inside the proton.
In reality, the interior of each proton consists of a mixture of six flavors of quarks, their antiparticles and gluons, which scientists call a world of “proton ocean”. This mass of matter is perfectly stabilized in a state that appears to be only three quarks, thanks to a wonderful rule.
“It’s frankly a miracle how this interacts with each other.” said Donald Geesaman, a nuclear physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Theorists used to think that the different types of antimatter within the proton were evenly distributed. Thirty years ago, researchers began to realize a startling feature of the chaotic world inside the proton: the antimatter inside was not symmetrically distributed, and there seemed to be significantly more anti-down quarks than anti-up quarks.
Ten years later, another group of researchers saw various signs that revealed an asymmetric ratio between the two antimatter species, but were limited by the level of precision that the experiment could achieve at the Time to explore it in depth.
Now, two decades later, Geissaman and colleagues have completed an experiment called SeaQuest to verify this. This is the most detailed study of antimatter in protons to date, according to Quanta Magazine, an authoritative popular science publication.
The study was published Feb. 24 in the journal Nature. Its measurements show that, on average, the ratio of anti-down quarks to anti-up quarks in each proton is 1.4:1.
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