In September, members of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider announced that they had measured the strength of the strong force with unprecedented precision.
What does that mean, and why do physicists find it exciting?
Let’s start with the strong force. You probably know that the world all around you—your phone, your house, your cat—is made of atoms. And that those atoms are made of protons and neutrons, tightly bound in a nucleus with electrons whizzing around them. Perhaps you also know that those protons and neutrons are made of even smaller particles, called quarks, which cannot be broken down into any smaller components, as far as we know.
What is holding those quarks together? What keeps them glued to each other, so that they can form the nucleons inside the atoms that create the molecules that you and I are made of? That would be the strong force.
“The strong force is one of what we consider the four fundamental forces,” explains Stefano Camarda, a researcher on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
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