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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

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.

 

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