It may be hard to imagine that the debris of violent heavy ion collisions—which dissolve the boundaries of protons and neutrons and produce thousands of new particles—can be used to gain detailed insight into the properties of nucleons. However, new advances in experimental methods along with improved theoretical modeling have made it possible. Based on a state-of-the-art model for the colliding nuclei and the hydrodynamic evolution of the quark-gluon plasma produced in the collision, a recent Physical Review Letters study demonstrates that specific observables are strongly sensitive to the size of the protons and neutrons inside the colliding nuclei.
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Source: Phys.org