Alarcon and Comfort are looking even deeper. They want information about the quarks and gluons which vibrate beneath the surface of the proton and neutron. The work involves an enormous variety of tasks. Like other researchers, the ASU physicists must write detailed proposals, compete for funds and the use of accelerator facilities, build particle detectors, write computer software to analyze data, and coordinate large teams of people to achieve a common goal. It simply is not easy to get information from inside the atomic nucleus.
Light waves are far larger than the size of the nucleus.
Alarcon and Comfort explain that the only known effective technique for exploring this infinitesimal world is a process of creative destruction. Massive particle accelerators are used to fire subatomic projectiles at atomic targets. Equally large and sophisticated detectors are designed to capture the products of the resulting collisions. The particle physicist's main effort is devoted to finding ways to reconstruct what happened in these collisions. The process is similar to a police officer who, arriving at an accident scene, must try to reconstruct the sequence of events that led to the skid marks, broken glass, and mangled metal.