Imaging the nucleus with high-energy photons

Understand

In the 1930's, nuclear physicists developed the first realistic atomic models, showing that nuclei were made up of protons and neutrons.

• In the 1960's, Deep Inelastic Scattering experiments showed that protons and neutrons had internal structure: quarks and gluons (collectively, partons), and later experiments showed that the parton momentum distributions are different in heavy nuclei, compared to those in free nucleons.
• This difference is not surprising; partons are sensitive to their environment, and two gluons from different nucleons may fuse together, for example.
• Understanding how quarks and gluons behave in the nuclear environment is a significant focus of modern nuclear physics.