Physicists zoom in on gluons' contribution to proton spin

By analyzing the highest-energy proton collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a particle collider at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, nuclear physicists have gotten a glimpse of how a multitude of gluons that individually carry very little of the protons' overall momentum contribute to the protons' spin. The data described in a recently published paper indicate that these glue-like particles--named for their role in binding the quarks that ...