NPStrong, the Nuclear Physics and Strong Interaction Group, joined LIP in the beginning of 2020. Its members share common research interests in nuclear and hadron physics.

We work on a variety of topics addressing nonperturbative phenomena in quantum field theories with computational methods, in particular Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). This includes the internal structure of mesons and baryons and their interactions with photons, the production mechanisms and properties of exotic hadrons such as quark-gluon hybrids and glueballs, and the nature of tetraquark and pentaquarks which are not yet understood from first principles and challenge our understanding of the strong force. The fundamental questions behind these activities are the origin of confinement of quarks in hadrons and nuclei, the origin of mass, and the properties of matter in extreme conditions such as heavy-ion collisions and neutron stars.

To describe bound systems of quarks and gluons, we use nonperturbative functional methods such as Dyson-Schwinger and Bethe-Salpeter equations. These methods are complementary to lattice QCD simulations and provide ab-initio solutions for QCD’s correlation functions, where the soft and hard scales are intertwined by nonperturbative integral equations. Such correlation functions subsequently enter in the calculation of hadron properties and allow us to make predictions for hadronic observables.