Physicists from the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have developed a new technique that opens a door to high-precision studies of the dynamics of the strong force between unstable hadrons.
An artist’s impression of the interaction between Omega (Ω) hyperon (left) and a proton (right). Image credit: Daniel Dominguez.
Hadrons are composite particles made of two or three quarks bound together by the strong interaction, which is mediated by gluons.
This interaction also acts between hadrons, binding nucleons (protons and neutrons) together inside atomic nuclei.
One of the biggest challenges in nuclear physics today is understanding the strong interaction between hadrons with different quark content from first principles, that is, starting from the strong interaction between the hadrons’ constituent quarks and gluons.
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ALICE collaboration opens avenue for high-precision studies of the strong force The collaboration shows how proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider can reveal the strong interaction between composite particles called hadrons
9 December, 2020 An artist’s impression of the ALICE study of the interaction between the rarest of the hyperons, Omega (Ω) hyperon (left), which contains three strange quarks, and a proton (right). (Image: CERN)
In a paper published today in
Nature, the ALICE collaboration describes a technique that opens a door to high-precision studies at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the dynamics of the strong force between hadrons.