Protons are tiny particles just a femtometer across, but without them, atoms wouldn't exist. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. If you want to probe the frontiers of fundamental physics, you have to ...

Look around you (or, if you’re sight impaired, touch something). Everything solid, liquid, or gas that you see and feel is made of matter. We sometimes call it “normal” matter, though with dark matter ...

The “lead” of a pencil is actually made of a substance called graphite which is made of carbon atoms. The picture shows a close-up of one carbon atom. A hydrogen atom has one proton as the nucleus and ...

Protons and electrons: A schematic toy model showing how proton transport is accompanied by electron polarization in chiral media. Due to the chiral induced spin selectivity effect, this electric ...

The stuff of daily existence is made of atoms, and all those atoms are made of the same three things: electrons, protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are very similar particles in most respects.

If you hit an atom’s nucleus hard enough, it will fall apart. But exactly how it falls apart tells us something about the internal structure of the nucleus and perhaps about the interior of neutron ...

Scientists have long wondered whether there is a limit to the number of protons and neutrons that can be clustered together to form the nucleus of an atom. A new study comes closer than ever to ...

The universe was too hot for atoms to form immediately after the Big Bang. Hydrogen formed about 3 minutes after the Big Bang. Helium formed in smaller amounts than hydrogen. Neutral atoms formed ...

Nuclear theorists at Brookhaven National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory have successfully employed a new theoretical approach to calculate the Collins-Soper kernel, a quantity that ...