How did PETRA at DESY provide evidence for gluons?
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subatomic particle
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator. At the LHC, located underground in Switzerland, physicists study subatomic particles.
In 1979, experiments conducted at the Positron-Electron Tandem Ring Accelerator (PETRA) at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) provided the first direct evidence for the existence of gluons.
Researchers observed the radiation of gluons by quarks during high-energy particle collisions. This discovery confirmed the theoretical framework of quantum chromodynamics, which describes the strong nuclear force as being mediated by these massless messenger particles. By studying these interactions, physicists were able to validate that quarks interact by emitting and absorbing gluons, similar to how electrically charged particles interact through the exchange of photons.12