Understanding the dynamics of gluons, the carriers of the strong force, especially in systems where they are extremely densely packed. The strong force is the least well understood part of the standard model of particle physics, yet gluons make up ~95% of the mass of the visible universe. To understand gluons well, we need to create extremely dense environments, and these are achieved both by probing particles with a gluon content, such as protons, at very high energies, or even better: probe heavy ions at high energies. This will be achieved, either at a future electron ion collider, proposed to be built in USA in the near future, or at the current experiments at the large hadron collider at CERN in Europe.
Contact: Dr. Arindam Chatterjee, Dr. Kenji Nishiwaki