Scope of the meeting
Hadron physics remains one of the most fascinating topics of fundamental physics. With the discovery of several dozen new conventional and exotic hadrons at major experimental facilities worldwide, hadron physics has received a tremendous boost in the past decade. This is accompanied by important theoretical developments in lattice QCD, effective theories, functional methods and in the interplay between theory and experiment based e.g. on dispersive techniques. Despite all this progress, many areas of hadron physics remain elusive. Exploring topics such as the organising principle of the spectrum of baryons and the properties and structure of nucleons and their excitations, the spectrum and internal structure of exotic mesons and the identification of glueballs in the experimental spectrum or the emergence of nuclear forces from QCD requires a dedicated experimental effort with access to many sources of information and controlled confrontation of the results with theoretical approaches.
The Erice School on Nuclear Physics 2023 intends to present the current status of the field of hadron physics including lectures by international experts of the various subareas as well as invited and contributed talks by the participants. The purpose of the meeting is to bring together experts and young researchers in the areas of nuclear and particle physics in order to discuss the current status and the pertinent interrelations among these fields as well as to explore future directions, both in experiment and theory. We aim to cover a broad range of topics to elucidate synergies and identify areas of future progress. This should be especially beneficial to the younger participants of the meeting.
In detail, the following topics will be discussed:
- properties of quarks and gluons
- mass generation and confinement
- spectra and decays of conventional baryons
- spectra and decays of exotic baryons (hybrids, pentaquarks)
- spectra and decays of exotic mesons (glueballs, four-quark states, hybrids)
- form factors and structure functions of hadrons
- emergence of nuclear forces from QCD
