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Strong evidence that ‘baryon junctions’ give proton its identity

Nature作者：José Guilherme Milhano2026年10月6日正文已收录本站
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A conserved property of protons and neutrons is carried not by their constituent particles but by structures that mediate the force between them.

By

  1. José Guilherme Milhano

    1. José Guilherme Milhano is in the Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics (LIP), Lisbon 1649-003, Portugal and the Superior Technical Institute (IST), University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal.

  2. Néstor Armesto

    1. Néstor Armesto is in the Galician Institute of High Energy Physics (IGFAE), University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela 15705, Spain.

The visible Universe owes its existence to the brief moments after the Big Bang when many of the laws of physics that hold the current Universe together were broken, allowing an imbalance between visible matter and antimatter to emerge1. One of these laws is the conservation of a quantity called baryon number, which is assigned to all protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are a type of particle called a baryon, which is made up of three fundamental particles known as quarks. Writing in Science, the STAR Collaboration2 reports the strongest experimental evidence yet that baryon number is carried not by the quarks themselves but by structures called baryon junctions, which bind them together.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-03129-5

References

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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