The STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider tracks thousands of particles produced in collisions of heavy ions such as gold, as shown in the colorful particle tracks on the right-hand side of the image. In collisions of polarized protons at RHIC, STAR is also seeing hints of an effect of a different kind of color — the “color” charges of the quarks that make up the colliding protons. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory
The proton sounds like a simple object, but it’s not. Inside, there’s a teeming microcosm of quarks and gluons with properties such as spin and “color” charge that contribute to the particle’s seemingly simplistic role as a building block of visible matter...
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