Wei Kou

Inside a proton, gluons buzz around like bees in a hive, gluing quarks to each other and to themselves. The higher the collision energy, the more gluons emerge from the fog. Physicists have long sought a way to describe this swarm with a single simple function, but each time, they had to tweak the form to fit a specific experiment.

Atomic nuclei are wrapped in fluffy electron coats — in such attire, they can't get close enough to embrace. But swap the light coat for a heavy one: a muon, a particle from the standard model, shrinks the cloud by nearly 200 times.