Becky Ferreira, 4 Jan. 2023, Motherboard, Vice Media.

>For the first time ever, scientists at Brookhaven have captured interference patterns that are created by the entanglement of two particles with different charges, a breakthrough that has opened up a completely new window into the mysterious innards of atoms that make up visible matter in the universe, according to a study published on Wednesday in Science Advances.

>“There's never been any measurement in the past of interference between distinguishable particles,” said Daniel Brandenburg, a physics professor at the Ohio State University who co-authored the new study, in a call with Motherboard. “That's the discovery; the application is that we get to use it to do some nuclear physics.”

>“I wasn't even, in a sense, trying to find something so fundamental about quantum mechanics,” he continued. “When we realized that there's something really interesting going on here, that was a really big surprise to me.”

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>Brandenburg and his colleagues achieved this milestone with the help of a sensitive detector called the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC, or STAR, that captured interactions between gold ions that were boosted to the brink of light speed.

>Clouds of photons, which are particles that carry light, surround the ions and interact with another type of particle, called gluons, that hold atomic nuclei together.

>These encounters between the photons and the gluons set off a chain of events that ultimately created two new particles, called pions, which have opposite charges—one positive and one negative.

>When these pions careened into the STAR detector, the precision instrument measured some of their key properties, such as velocity and angle of impact, which were then used to probe the size, shape, and arrangement of gluons inside the atomic nuclei with a precision that has never been achieved before.

>What’s more, the team is even able to make out the rough positions of key particles in the nucleus, such as protons and neutrons, as well as the distribution of gluons.

>It also offers a new way to unravel persistent mysteries about the behavior of atoms at high energies.

Science Advances, Jan. 2023. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abq3903