How to extract the proton's hidden structure from collision data

Physicists at Jefferson Lab collide electrons with protons to map the proton's internal structure through deeply virtual exclusive reactions. Previous analyses extracted only three of the key building-block descriptors—called Compton form factors—from cross-section data alone. This work combines cross-section and asymmetry measurements in a unified statistical framework, revealing more form factors than traditional methods, and uses Monte Carlo sampling to map out what the data actually constrains.