Specific programme: European Research Infrastructures
UPV/EHU Partner Status: Beneficiary
UPV/EHU PI: Gunar Schnell
Project start: 01/06/2019
Project end: 31/05/2023

Brief description: The strong interaction is one of the cornerstones of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, and its experimental and theoretical study attracts an active community of about 2500 researchers in Europe. The list of fundamental open questions at the frontier of our current knowledge in the strong interaction is very rich and varied including a full understanding of (i) the partonic structure of hadrons, (ii) exotic hadronic states, properties of (iii) dense quark matter and of (iv) hot and dense quark-gluon plasma, as well as (v) precision tests of the SM. Such research topics are studied experimentally and theoretically mostly via particle collisions at low (a few tens of GeV) and high (up to 14 TeV) energies. Associated developments in state-of-the-art detectors/data-acquisition/beams/targets are required, as well as in theoretical (lattice, effective field, perturbative) calculations. The STRONG-2020 project brings together many of the leading research groups and infrastructures involved today in the study of the strong interaction in Europe, and also exploits the innovation potential in applied research through the development of detector systems with applications beyond fundamental physics, e.g. for medical imaging and information technology.