Proton May Be Smaller Than We Thought
After making the cover story of Nature in 2010, an international research team led by Prof. Yi-Wei Liu tackled the puzzle of proton size once again through the transition of another muonic hydrogen atom. The measurement of the size of the proton this time is 0.84087 (39) femtometer; consistent with the prior data but the precision of the measurement was increased to 1.7 folds, and the CODATA differences expanded to seven standard deviations and the proton magnetic radius was also obtained. The research result was published on January 25^th in Science. President Lih J. Chen and the research team held a press conference at National Science Council on March 6^th and stated that Nature and Science are fierce competitors in terms of publishing scientific articles; it is really a rare phenomenon that different stages of the same series of research are published by these two prestigious journals!......More