The subatomic particles are a mash-up of three lighter particles called quarks: two of the type known as up quarks and one down quark. But physicists have speculated for decades that protons may also host more massive quarks, called “intrinsic” charm quarks. A new analysis supports that idea, physicists report in the Aug. 18 Nature.
Charm quarks are much heavier than up or down quarks. So heavy that, mind-bendingly, “you can have a component of the proton which is heavier than the proton itself,” says theoretical physicist Juan Rojo of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
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