How to Use proton in a Sentence

proton

noun
  • The change is the size of about one-thousandth the width of a proton.
    Marina Koren, The Atlantic, 3 Oct. 2017
  • There are now 27 proton beam units in the U.S., up from about half a dozen a decade ago.
    Jay Hancock, Washington Post, 2 May 2018
  • The quarks that make up protons have anti-quarks, and so on.
    Dennis Overbye, New York Times, 27 Sep. 2023
  • It hasn’t even been tested to the millimeter scale, let alone to the scale of a proton.
    Thomas Lewton, Quanta Magazine, 10 July 2023
  • To an extent, this is similar to the question of where the mass of a proton is.
    John Timmer, Ars Technica, 3 Apr. 2023
  • This told them there was something hard and discrete at the center of the proton.
    Amina Khan, latimes.com, 29 Mar. 2018
  • Also returning are the Ghostbusters, though the folks in the proton packs are kids this time.
    Brian Truitt, USA TODAY, 15 Jan. 2020
  • Patients have been treated with protons since the 1950s.
    Bonnie Berkowitz, chicagotribune.com, 14 Mar. 2018
  • Each atom of the stuff packs a whopping 118 protons into its dense center.
    Michael Block, Scientific American, 19 Mar. 2018
  • What the target is made of depends on how many protons the researchers want in the final product.
    Stephanie Pappas, Scientific American, 14 May 2024
  • A proton consists of two up quarks and one down quark, while a neutron contains one up quark and two down quarks.
    Kenneth Chang, New York Times, 6 July 2017
  • Gluons, the particles of the strong force, connect with two up quarks and one down quark to create a proton.
    Popular Mechanics, 31 Mar. 2023
  • As the universe cooled, these processes stopped and the ratio of protons to neutrons was set.
    Anne-Katherine Burns, The Conversation, 26 July 2023
  • Neutrons are the neutral counterpart to protons, one of the constituent parts of an atom.
    Briley Lewis, Popular Science, 5 Sep. 2024
  • Whether your son is going as Mike or Dr. Venkman, this costume still comes with the jumpsuit, proton pack and four badges.
    Alicia Kortendick, oregonlive, 7 Oct. 2019
  • The proton pack is still one of the coolest weapons recorded in film, and the Ghostbuster outfits have been a Halloween staple for decades (ask the Stranger Things kids).
    Adrianna Freedman, Men's Health, 30 Aug. 2022
  • In other words, the ratio of baryons, which include protons and neutrons, to photons, which light is made of, would have to shrink.
    Charles Q. Choi, Space.com, 26 Sep. 2018
  • This hot—as in, hotter-than-the sun hot—world held the ingredients of atoms, protons, and neutrons in what is called quarks.
    Tim Newcomb, Popular Mechanics, 22 Feb. 2023
  • There, the PPIs interfered with proton pumps in retinal cells.
    Bradley J. Fikes, The Seattle Times, 3 July 2017
  • The kids rifle through the busters famous brown jumpsuits, proton packs stopping at the iconic Ecto-1.
    Meredith Woerner, chicagotribune.com, 9 Dec. 2019
  • These would have been even smaller — just the mass of a rhino, condensed into less than the volume of a single proton.
    Jacopo Prisco, CNN, 17 June 2024
  • WIMPs, despite their puny name, are thought to have a mass as much as a thousand times more than standard matter’s protons.
    Joe Lindsey, Popular Mechanics, 28 May 2019
  • Pentaquarks are heavier cousins of protons and neutrons, which are also made of quarks.
    Adrian Cho, Science | AAAS, 5 June 2019
  • The history of the search for proton decay, meanwhile, goes back even further.
    The Economist, 13 Jan. 2018
  • The radius of a proton varies depending on whether its charge or its mass is being measured.
    Will Stephenson, Harper's Magazine, 16 Aug. 2023
  • The problem is that an object usually has about the same number of electrons and protons, so that net force is at least weak.
    Rhett Allain, WIRED, 25 June 2019
  • But unlike the massless photon, the W should have a mass nearly 86 times that of the proton, according to the standard model.
    Byadrian Cho, science.org, 20 Sep. 2024
  • Most of the lithium on Earth is an isotope called lithium-7, meaning the nucleus has 3 protons and 4 neutrons.
    Erik Klemetti, Discover Magazine, 20 Sep. 2023
  • Yee found that the same proton pump also helps diatoms make their tough silica shell.
    Kevin Hartnett, Quanta Magazine, 6 July 2023
  • In spite of the detectors’ sizes, a gravitational wave changes the relative lengths of their arms by less than the width of a proton.
    Adrian Cho, Science | AAAS, 10 Mar. 2021

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'proton.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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