In particle-physics news: QED cascades and the Parton. QED means quantum electrodynamics. Parton has nothing to do with chesty singers of para-country muzak. Anyway both press-releases come (ultimately) from our Department of Energy.
QED cascades are presently thought to be expensive, the purview of large hardon hadron colliders. The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab now has a process which might cut down that cost - firing a laser-beam and an electron-beam toward one another. Quod erat creandum a QED plasma.
As for DoE Dolly: that's Argonne. Richard Feynman pictured the proton travelling at near the speed of light as a beam carrying an infinite number of quarks and gluons moving in the same direction
. This was, previously, dealt with by quantum chromo dynamics (QCD). The claim is that this couldn't tell a fast-moving parton from a slow-moving one. But ... weren't they all traveling relativistically?
Argonne's aim is to improve our knowledge of the structure of a relativistic proton. Like we recently got from a (slower) neutron.
I don't pretend to know much of either; except, these seem more engineering advances than anything to do with theory. We do need the engineering, though. The processes cost a lot and our theorists have been hitting their limits of late.
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