Dr. Michael Geller will be hosting Dr. Kanzo Nakayama of the University of Georgia Department of Physics and Astronomy this week. His talk is entitled, "Probing the Structure of Hadrons."

Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is believed to be the correct theory of strong interactions. The basic degrees-of-freedom of QCD are the quarks which interact with each other by exchanging gluons due to ”color” charges. This is analogous to Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), the theory of electromagnetic interaction, where the electrons interact with each other by exchanging photons due to electric charges. Quarks come in three independent color states. One of the three fundamental properties of QCD is known as the confinement, which is the mechanism behind the fact that only color neutral particles are observed isolated in nature. Since quarks are colored particles, the simplest color neutral particles are composed of quark-antiquark or 3-quark configurations. The former type of particles are known as mesons and the latter as baryons; collectively, they are known as hadrons.

While two of the three fundamental properties of QCD are well understood, the confining mechanism of quarks which results in physically observable particles (hadrons) still awaits a full understanding. In order to obtain a deeper insight into this problem, a detailed experimental and theoretical investigation of hadron spectroscopy is imperative.

In order to extract relevant physics information from the experimental data on hadron spectroscopy taken at the major laboratories worldwide, a consistent reaction theory capable of quantitative predictions of the reaction processes induced by both electromagnetic and hadronic probes is required. In this talk, an overview of the activities at UGA in this field will be given.