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The Quest to Map the Inside of the Proton

Long-anticipated experiments that use light to mimic gravity are revealing the distribution of energies, forces, and pressures inside a subatomic particle for the first time.

“We really see it as opening up a completely new direction that will change our way of looking at the fundamental structure of matter,” said Latifa Elouadrhiri, a physicist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia, who is involved in the effort. A separate team at Jefferson Lab used an analogous trick (involving a double-gluon interaction) to publish a preliminary gravitational map of these gluon effects in Nature last year, but it too was based on limited, low-energy data. Phiala Shanahan, a nuclear and particle physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, leads a team that computes the behavior of quarks and gluons starting from the equations of the strong force.

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