Departmental Colloquium
- Title
- Chiral Symmetry and Medium Modification of Vector Mesons
- Guest Speaker
- Dr. Chaden Djalali
- Guest Affiliation
- University of South Carolina, Department of Physics and Astronomy
- Host
- Dr. Kanzo Nakayama
- When
- Thursday, September 23, 2010 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
- Location
- Physics 202
- Details
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The theory of the strong interaction, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), has been remarkably successful in describing high-energy and short-distance-scale experiments involving quarks and gluons. However, applying QCD to low energy and large-distance-scale experiments has been a major challenge. Chiral symmetry is one of the most fundamental symmetries in QCD and provides guiding principles to deal with strong interaction phenomena in the non-perturbative domain. Most of the mass of ordinary matter (98%) is generated by the spontaneous breaking of Chiral symmetry in the vacuum. Various QCD-inspired models predict a modification of the properties of hadrons in nuclear matter from their free-space values. A review of experiments searching for the in-medium modifications of light mesons will be given trying to assess if they confirm or refute these theoretical predictions. Several complementary high statistics experiments are planned at different nuclear physics accelerators (JLab, GSI, JPARC and RHIC) to further study the properties of hadrons in the medium.