The subatomic world remains a mystery for scientists trying to discover how particles smaller than atoms are structured, to understand the way our reality is formulated. But the task is not simple, in fact, despite the progress of science, although this intriguing image has recently been taken, which is so far the closest thing we have to what atoms are like.
The and it is precisely in one of them where the strange image was obtained. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Accelerator (RHIC), located within the Brookhaven Laboratory in the United States, has the ability to accelerate gold ions to dizzying speeds; here the ions are propelled up to 99.995% of the speed of light.
How the most precise image of the atom was obtained
Through a series of quantum fluctuations, particles, including the light we observe, interact with gluons, glue-like particles that hold quarks together within the protons and neutrons of the nuclei of atoms.
Although scientists cannot observe these interactions, they know they are there thanks to measuring the speed of the atoms, as well as the angles at which they impact the RHIC’s STAR detector. Thanks to this data, particle physicists can go back to obtain crucial information about atoms and use it to map the arrangement of subparticles within the nuclei of atoms, now more precisely than ever.
“This technique is similar to the way they use positron emission tomography (PET) to see what happens inside the brain and other parts of the body,” said Dr. James Daniel Brandenburg, a member of the STAR Collaboration and a physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Ohio State University.
But in this case, we’re talking about mapping features on the scale of femtometers, quadrillionths of , the size of an individual proton.
In other words, the researchers have managed to obtain precise details about how gold atoms are structured, using a type of never-before-seen experiment. The result is an amazing image that shows the arrangement of particles in the nucleus, although interference from light beams emitted by the particle accelerator can also be observed.
References: STAR Collaboration. (2023). Tomography of ultrarelativistic nuclei with polarized photon-gluon collisions. Science Advances, 9(1),