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Charmed protons weigh less than the sum of their parts

Accepted submission by Snotnose at 2022-08-21 16:40:46 from the wish my stomach was charmed dept.
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From https://www.livescience.com/protons-charm-quark: [livescience.com]

A proton is one of the subatomic particles that make up the nucleus of an atom. As small as protons are, they are composed of even tinier elementary particles known as quarks, which come in a variety of "flavors," or types: up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top. Typically, a proton is thought to be made of two up quarks and one down quark.

But a new study finds it's more complicated than that. Protons can also contain a charm quark, an elementary particle that's 1.5 times the mass of the proton itself. Even weirder, when the proton does contain the charm quark, the heavy particle still only carries about half the proton's mass.


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