Many discoveries in physics flow from theory to experiment. Albert Einstein theorized that mass bends the fabric of space-time, and then Arthur Eddington observed the effects of this bending during a solar eclipse. Likewise, Peter Higgs first proposed the existence of the Higgs boson; nearly 50 years later, the particle was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider.

Hadronization is different. It’s the process by which elementary particles called quarks and gluons join together to form protons and neutrons — the components of atoms. No current theory can accurately describe how or why hadronization occurs.

“This is really the opposite of the norm,” says Rithya Kunnawalkam Elayavalli, a high-energy nuclear physicist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Kunnawalkam Elayavalli spends their days observing hadronization and trying to formulate a theory that explains it. They’re part of the Sphenix and STAR experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, as well as a member of the CMS experiment at CERN near Gen