OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — Examining the smallest parts of the universe often takes the biggest kinds of equipment. At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a unique piece of equipment the size of a building is ...

New research has found that protons are about 20 times more likely to pair up with neutrons than with other protons in the nucleus. The result, based on the first-ever simultaneous measurement of such ...

Deep in the heart of the matter, some numbers don't add up. For example, while protons and neutrons are made of quarks, ...

Individual protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei turn out not to behave according to the predictions made by existing theoretical models. This surprising conclusion, reached by an international team ...

Standard physics classes in most high schools talk about matter being made of atoms. And atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons. And that in each of those parts of the atom, there are three ...

If you hit an atom’s nucleus hard enough, it will fall apart. But exactly how it falls apart tells us something about the internal structure of the nucleus and perhaps about the interior of neutron ...

An element's atomic number defines it. An element with 17 protons will always be chlorine. However an element's mass numbers can vary, which means that it can have different numbers of neutrons. So ...

HEISENBERG has discussed the hypothesis that the nucleus of an atom is composed of neutrons and protons only, the neutron being regarded as a fundamental entity and not as a combination of an electron ...

Physicists peering inside the neutron are seeing glimmers of what appears to be an impossible situation. The vexing findings pertain to quarks, which are the main components of neutrons and protons.

The formation of cosmic structure, on both large scales and small scales, is highly dependent on how dark matter and normal matter interact. Despite the indirect evidence for dark matter, we'd love to ...