Physicists at MIT and elsewhere are blasting beams of ions at clouds of protons —like throwing nuclear darts at the speed of light — to map the structure of an atom’s nucleus. The experiment is an inversion of the usual particle accelerators, which hurl electrons at atomic nuclei to probe their structures. The team used this “inverse kinematics” approach to sift out the messy, quantum mechanical influences within a nucleus, to provide a clear view of a nucleus’ protons and neutrons, as well as its short-range correlated (SRC) pairs. These…
