{"id":144420,"date":"2022-08-19T11:22:58","date_gmt":"2022-08-19T16:22:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/protons-contain-charm-quarks-heavier-than-themselves"},"modified":"2022-08-19T11:22:58","modified_gmt":"2022-08-19T16:22:58","slug":"protons-contain-charm-quarks-heavier-than-themselves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/protons-contain-charm-quarks-heavier-than-themselves","title":{"rendered":"Protons Contain Charm Quarks Heavier Than Themselves"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/protons-contain-charm-quarks-heavier-than-themselves3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Protons, once thought to be fundamental particles, have been known since 1968 to instead be composed of quarks. Some quarks are actually heavier than protons, but this wasn\u2019t considered a problem because protons were thought to be made up purely of light quarks \u2013 two up and one down quark to be precise. However, new research shows protons also contain <a href=\"https:\/\/www.iflscience.com\/three-new-particles-discovered-by-the-large-hadron-collider-64335\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">charm quarks<\/a>, which are indeed heavier than protons, like a pot holding a bigger pot inside it.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat goes against all common sense,\u201d said <a href=\"https:\/\/juanrojo.com\/about-me\/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Dr Juan Rojo<\/a> of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in a <a href=\"https:\/\/vu.nl\/en\/news\/2022\/new-nature-paper-proves-the-proton-has-some-intrinsic-charm\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">statement<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s like buying a one-kilogram pack of salt, which then comes out two kilograms of sand.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>However, anyone highly attached to common sense dropped out of quantum mechanics courses in the first six weeks, so Rojo and co-authors were undeterred. In <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-022-04998-2\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Nature<\/a> they have revealed that less than one percent of the proton\u2019s mass comes from quarks heavier than the proton.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Protons, once thought to be fundamental particles, have been known since 1968 to instead be composed of quarks. Some quarks are actually heavier than protons, but this wasn\u2019t considered a problem because protons were thought to be made up purely of light quarks \u2013 two up and one down quark to be precise. However, new [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}