HEP Colloquia 2024

by Jennifer Rittenhouse West (INFN Torino)

Tuesday 10 Dec 2024, 15:00 → 16:00 Europe/Rome

Sala Consiliare (Department of Physics)

Entangled Quarks across distance scales: Diquark formation & Hidden-color state effects from Colliders to the Cosmos

Fundamental quantum chromodynamics, manifested through SU(3) interactions and short-range QCD potentials, is proposed to significantly affect hadronic and nuclear structure. As a two-pronged solution to a decades-old puzzle from deep inelastic scattering (DIS) experiments, in which quark behavior in the nuclear environment is shown to deviate unexpectedly from quark behavior in free nucleons, both diquark formation and a hidden-color QCD Fock state dubbed the "hexadiquark" are shown to be viable modifiers of quark distribution functions.  Quark-quark bonds across and within color singlets offer a possible elementary particle basis for a diverse range of phenomena including a quark-level source of roughly 20% of nuclear structure, the strange-antistrange quark distributions in the proton, the disruption of 7Li formation during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, and a Standard Model explanation for experimental results from the ATOMKI collaboration.