The US Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Sputnik Animation present a new animation of the particles and forces that dominate the quantum world, along with a website exhibit that visualizes the structure of matter throughout history.
This frame from “Visualizing the Nucleus” shows animations of four different nuclei, with their protons and neutrons, quarks and gluons visible. Image Credit: Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
There has never been a better moment to review the particles and forces that create the visible universe: the United Nations has declared 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, marking 100 years since the first developments in quantum mechanics.
“Visualizing the Nucleus,” a new video produced by Jefferson Lab, offers an animated glimpse into the core of matter. The video was produced by James LaPlante, an Animator at Sputnik Animation; Richard Milner, a Nuclear Physicist at MIT; and Rolf Ent, a Nuclear Physicist at Jefferson Lab. The group was inspired by ancient philosophers who wondered about the nature of matter.
Around 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Democritus postulated that everything was made up of common bits known as atoms. By the early 1900s, scientists had figured out many of the contemporary atom's secrets, including its protons, neutrons, and even its hidden quarks and gluons. Nuclear physicists are working today to further understand this quantum universe.
Particle accelerators are used by physicists to thump, batter, or smash the particles inside the nucleus to "see" such tiny particles. Massive detectors collect data on the particles that emerge from these occurrences. Like a frozen moment in time, this information can be utilized to reconstruct the appearance and behavior of the particles when they were shattered.
However, these experiments do not provide convenient tiny snippets of the findings. Rather, data points are displayed on a graph for nuclear physicists. In order to imagine an animation of the nucleus and its internal operations, the team had to interpret those data points.
It started with the proton. We have all this body of data, but we cannot visualize it. And then we started realizing that we have similar issues with the nucleus.
Rolf Ent, Principal Staff Scientist, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
Rolf Ent is also a Co-Associate Director of the Electron-Ion Collider experimental program at Thomas lab.
However, the scientists understood that if such particles could be directly viewed, the data-driven worldview derived from nuclear physics experiments might be loosely translated into a description of what they may look like.
While I am a science nerd, I do not have a degree in nuclear physics. So often I would have conversations with Richard and Rolf to better understand the physics going on at the quantum level.
James LaPlante, Animator, Sputnik
The team claims that despite seamless cooperation and comprehension of the physical ideas expressed in contemporary nuclear physics experimental data, the project only achieved success after innovative approaches were used to overcome the visualization hurdles.
In a nucleus, for example, the motion of the protons and neutrons approaches the speed of light. This also applies to the probes that nuclear physicists use to learn more about those particles. The physicists had to use their imagination to depict particles and forces interacting inside matter at almost the speed of light in order to simplify the information displayed in the animation.
It required a definition of a new unit of time: the baby second. Once we realized this, then the motion could be animated more or less straightforwardly.
Richard Milner, Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The final product is a short animation and video that depicts the dynamic interactions between forces and particles in their own quantum universe.
Ent added, “In ‘Visualizing the Nucleus,’ we specifically look, with the lens of protons and neutrons, at how the nucleus would appear. What is the size, the shape, the motion in nuclei with its main building blocks, the protons and neutrons? In the movie, you see that in reality, there's still also this quantum world dominated by quarks and gluons.”
During the October meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Nuclear Physics, the team’s nuclear physics colleagues were shown the new video.
Milner added, “It was very well received. It was played on loop on a TV in a public place during the meeting and received wide exposure. I have distributed it to faculty colleagues and have received very positive responses.”
Along with the movie, the team unveiled an installation with a series of display modules that show how the quantum realm has been envisioned, discussed, and depicted throughout recorded human history. The modules are now available on the Visualizing the Quantum World website.
The team intends to build on their success with a series of short videos that go deeper into sophisticated nuclear physics subjects. These could include descriptions of neutrinoless double beta decay, explanations for spin polarization in nuclei, updates on short-range correlated pairs of protons and neutrons, and investigations into the electric dipole moments in distorted nuclei
LaPlante concluded, “Next, we are going to dive back into the nucleus to explore the quantum interactions going on between the protons and neutrons. It is a chaotic space moving at light speed in an incredibly small volume. I am looking forward to sorting through the chaos and manipulating time and space to better visualize what's going on inside every piece of matter in the universe.”