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A new precision measurement of the proton’s electric polarizability performed at Jefferson Lab has confirmed an unexplained bump in the data. The proton’s electric polarizability shows how susceptible the proton is to deformation, or stretching, in an electric field. Like size or charge, the electric polarizability is a fundamental property of proton structure. The data bump was widely thought to be a fluke when seen in earlier measurements, so this new, more precise measurement confirms the presence of the anomaly and signals that an unknown facet of the strong force may be at work. The research has just been published in the journal Nature.

Scientists have begun turning to new tools offered by machine learning to help save time and money. In the past several years, nuclear physics has seen a flurry of machine learning projects come online, with many papers published on the subject. Now, 18 authors from 11 institutions summarize this explosion of artificial intelligence-aided work in “Machine Learning in Nuclear Physics,” a paper recently published in Reviews of Modern Physics.

Take a break for lunch and nourish your brain with the latest in scientific discussions, presented by experts at Jefferson Lab. The second season of the lab’s summer series, Bite-Size Science, is now underway. The Bite-Size Science lunchtime lecture series features half-hour, live-streamed presentations on lab-related science, engineering and technology topics and presented by leaders in their fields. The presentations are tailored to non-scientists and are brief, free, and feature a chat feature for Q&A with the presenters.

Researchers have experimentally extracted the strength of the strong force, a quantity that firmly supports theories explaining how most of the mass or ordinary matter in the universe is generated. This quantity, known as the coupling of the strong force, describes how strongly two bodies interact or “couple” under this force. With Jefferson Lab data, the physicists were able to determine the strong force coupling at the largest distances yet.