quarks

Theoretical physicist James D. “BJ” Bjorken, theoretical physicist at SLAC and Stanford, passed away on Aug. 6. He was born in Chicago and in 1979, he left the SLAC and Stanford faculties to become associate director for physics at the Fermilab, saying he wanted to learn more about the accelerator side of things

There are patterns seen in quarks and leptons that remain unexplained, but it can be hypothesized that quarks and leptons might be created of still smaller particles. Does the Standard Model allow for an even smaller layer of matter to exist?

From CERN, June 15, 2021: A new study shows a class of new unknown particles that could account for the muon’s magnetism, known as leptoquarks, also affects the Higgs boson’s transformation into muons.

From Huxiu.com, March 15, 2021: Fermilab’s SeaQuest experiment is hailed for discovering a “sea” of quarks surging inside the proton.

From NewScientist, March 8, 2021: The recent experiment results of asymmetry in protons published in Nature calling out the new research used to improve measurement techniques from Fermilab’s SeaQuest detector.

From the Science of the Francis Mule, March 1, 2021: Scientists at Fermilab and Argonne publish new results from SeaQuest experiment showing the asymmetry of protons.

From Reccom Magazine, Feb. 26, 2021: Chuck Brown of the Fermilab SeaQuest research team is quoted in this piece on the sea of quarks inside the proton. The article discusses Fermilab’s contributions to the SeaQuest and NuSea experiments.

From Los Alamos Laboratory News, Feb. 24, 2021: The E-906/SeaQuest experiment, hosted by Fermilab, has produced results that are the opposite of what had previously been understood about proton structure and the dynamics of strong interacting antiquarks and gluons.

Protons are built from three quarks — two “up” quarks and one “down” quark. But they also contain a roiling sea of transient quarks and antiquarks that fluctuate into existence before swiftly annihilating one another. At the Fermilab-hosted SeaQuest experiment, researchers report that that lopsidedness persists in a realm of previously unexplored quark momenta.

Asymmetry in the proton confounds physicists, but a new discovery may bring back old theories to explain it.