Scientists model the 'flicker' of gluons in subatomic smashups August 2, 2016 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Four snapshots of the gluon density in a proton at high energy, as modeled by Mäntysaari and Schenke. Red indicates high gluon density, blue indicates low density. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory Scientists exploring the dynamic behavior of particles emerging from subatomic smashups at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)-a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility for nuclear physics research at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory-are increasingly interested in the role of gluons. These glue-like particles ordinarily bind quarks within protons and neutrons, and appear to play an outsized role in establishing key particle properties. A new study just published in Physical Review Letters reveals that a high degree of gluon fluctuation-a kind of flickering rearrangement in the distribution of gluon density within individual protons-could help explain some of the remarkable results at RHIC and also in nuclear physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-08-scientists-flicker-gluons-subatomic-smashups.html#jCp
http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.052301 Evidence of Strong Proton Shape Fluctuations from Incoherent Diffraction ABSTRACT We show within the saturation framework that measurements of exclusive vector meson production at high energy provide evidence for strong geometric fluctuations of the proton. In comparison, the effect of saturation scale and color charge fluctuations is weak. This knowledge will allow detailed future measurements of the incoherent cross section to tightly constrain the fluctuating geometry of the proton as a function of the parton momentum fraction x.
