Protons can hold an elementary particle heavier than themselves.
A proton is one of the subatomic particles that make up the nucleus of an atom. As small as protons are, they are composed of even tinier elementary particles known as quarks, which come in a variety of"flavors," or types: up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top. Typically, a proton is thought to be made of two up quarks and one down quark.
The finding all comes down to the probabilistic world of quantum physics. Though the charm quark is heavy, the chance of it popping into existence in a proton is fairly small, so the high mass and small chance basically cancel each other out. Put another way, the full mass of the charm quark doesn't get taken up by the proton, even if the charm quark is there, Science News reported.
There are six types of quarks. Three are heavier than protons and three are lighter than protons. The charm quark is the lightest of the heavy batch, so researchers wanted to start with that one to find out whether a proton could contain a quark heavier than itself. They did this by taking a new approach to 35 years of particle-smashing data.
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