Theoretical and Mathematical Physics: Hadron Structure and QCD
Our goal is to explore and understand the internal structure of nucleons in terms of their elementary constituents, i.e., quarks and gluons. Our research activity aims at answering fundamental questions such as: Can we define a "shape" of the nucleon and how does it look like? What generates the spin of the nucleon? In principle, the structure of the nucleon should be computed starting from the theory of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). In practice, the confinement of quarks and gluons within nucleons is a nonperturbative phenomenon, and QCD is extremely hard to solve in nonperturbative regimes. For this reason, despite the enormous progress of the last decades, we still have a limited knowledge of the internal structure of nucleons, which constitute more than 99% of ordinary matter.
Our group investigates these problems from various perspectives, using both theoretical and phenomenological approaches. We turn to experimental measurements to gather the largest amount of information concerning nucleon structure. We make use of the tools of perturbative QCD to study hard scattering processes such as Deep Inelastic Scattering. We try to interpret the experimental measurements in terms of quark and gluon distribution functions. We compute the relevant quantities using models that effectively replace nonperturbative QCD. We make predictions for unmeasured observables. We actively participate in suggesting and planning future experimental measurements.
Staff: Alessandro Bacchetta, Giuseppe Bozzi, Marco Guagnelli, Barbara Pasquini, Marco Radici