Sea quark surprise reveals deeper complexity in proton spin puzzle

New data from the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) add detail—and complexity—to an intriguing puzzle that scientists have been seeking to solve: how the building blocks that make up a proton contribute to its spin. The results, just published as a rapid communication in the journal Physical Review D, reveal definitively for the first time that different “flavors” of antiquarks contribute differently to the proton’s overall spin—and in a way that’s opposite to those flavors’ relative abundance.