Silently churning away at the heart of every atom in the Universe is a swirling wind of particles that physics yearns to understand.
No probe, no microscope, and no X-ray machine can hope to make sense of the chaotic blur of quantum cogs whirring inside an atom, leaving physicists to theorize the best they can based on the debris of high-speed collisions inside particle colliders.
Researchers now have a new tool that is already providing them with a small glimpse into the protons and neutrons that form the nuclei of atoms, one based on the entanglement of particles produced as gold atoms brush past each other at speed.
Using the powerful Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, scientists have shown how it's possible to glean precise details on the arrangement of gold's protons and neutrons using a kind of quantum interference never before seen in an experiment.
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