Journal
NATURE
Volume 527, Issue 7578, Pages 345-+Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/nature15724
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Funding
- RHIC Operations Group
- RCF at BNL
- NERSC Center at LBNL
- KISTI Center in Korea
- Open Science Grid consortium
- Office of Nuclear Physics within the US DOE Office of Science
- Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation
- NSFC
- MoST of China [2014CB845400]
- CAS of China
- MoE of China
- Korean Research Foundation
- GA of the Czech Republic
- MSMT of the Czech Republic
- FIAS of Germany
- DAE of India
- DST of India
- UGC of India
- National Science Centre of Poland
- National Research Foundation
- Ministry of Science, Education and Sports of the Republic of Croatia
- RosAtom of Russia
- US NSF
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien
- Division Of Physics [1505716, 1206009] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Division Of Physics
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [1352081] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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One of the primary goals of nuclear physics is to understand the force between nucleons, which is a necessary step for understanding the structure of nuclei and how nuclei interact with each other. Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus in 1911, and the large body of knowledge about the nuclear force that has since been acquired was derived from studies made on nucleons or nuclei. Although antinuclei up to antihelium-4 have been discovered(1) and their masses measured, little is known directly about the nuclear force between antinucleons. Here, we study antiproton pair correlations among data collected by the STAR experiment(2) at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)(3), where gold ions are collided with a centre-of-mass energy of 200 gigaelectronvolts per nucleon pair. Antiprotons are abundantly produced in such collisions, thus making it feasible to study details of the antiproton-antiproton interaction. By applying a technique similar to Hanbury Brown and Twiss intensity interferometry(4), we show that the force between two antiprotons is attractive. In addition, we report two key parameters that characterize the corresponding strong interaction: the scattering length and the effective range of the interaction. Our measured parameters are consistent within errors with the corresponding values for proton-proton interactions. Our results provide direct information on the interaction between two antiprotons, one of the simplest systems of antinucleons, and so are fundamental to understanding the structure of more-complex antinuclei and their properties.
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