The Large Light Collider
They went looking for collisions between photons and nuclei, called photonuclear collisions, in data collected during the lead-ion runs at the LHC. These runs have happened in the few weeks just before the LHC’s winter shutdown each year that the LHC has been in operation.
Lead nuclei are made up of protons and neutrons, which are made up of even smaller fundamental particles called quarks. “You can think of the nucleus like a bag of quarks,” Noronha-Hostler says.
This bag of quarks is held together by gluons, which “glue” small groups of quarks into composite particles called hadrons.
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