The Strength of the Strong Force

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The strength of the strong force:

Much ado was made about the Higgs boson when this elusive particle was discovered in 2012. Though it was touted as giving ordinary matter mass, interactions with the Higgs field only generate about 1 percent of ordinary mass. The other 99 percent comes from phenomena associated with the strong force, the fundamental force that binds smaller particles called quarks into larger particles called protons and neutrons that comprise the nucleus of the atoms of ordinary matter.

Now, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility 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. Strong force coupling varies with distance between the particles affected by the force. Prior to this research, theories disagreed on how strong force coupling should behave at large distance: some predicted it should grow with distance, some that it should decrease, and some that it should become constant.

[...] They found that as distance increases between affected bodies, strong force coupling grows quickly before leveling off and becoming constant.

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