Simons Collaboration on Confinement and QCD Strings

26 Sep 2022

Our members Matthias Gaberdiel (ETH Zurich) and Victor Gorbenko (EPFL) are part of the Simons Collaboration on Confinement and QCD Strings.

"Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) provides the fundamental description of the strong nuclear force and is a key component of the Standard Model of particle physics. The strong interactions are responsible, among other things, for binding protons and neutrons into nuclei, in spite of the electromagnetic repulsion of the protons. QCD is a quantum gauge field theory with local SU(3) symmetry that describes the interactions of colored quarks and gluons. They are observed to be “confined” inside the color-neutral hadronic states, such as the protons, neutrons and pi-mesons. The color confinement is among the most important and fascinating phenomena in fundamental physics. The celebrated asymptotic freedom of QCD implies that the gauge coupling vanishes in the short distance limit. The converse effect is its growth at long distances, giving rise to a host of non-perturbative phenomena including chiral symmetry breaking and the appearance of a mass gap related to the absence of the colored particles (quarks and gluons) as asymptotic states. While evidence for these phenomena has been provided by the numerical lattice simulations of QCD, as well as by simplified theoretical models, their proof in QCD is still missing. This is a profound problem, which is the first in the list of Clay Millennium Problems. One of the goals of the new Simons collaboration is to improve our understanding of confinement."

Phase I & II research project(s)

Two Fields Medal winners in the Federal Parliament

Middle European Mathematical Olympiad 2022