2016/06/22 by Matthew Shepherd, Matthew R. Shepherd, Jo Dudek +3 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Electron #Gluon #Hadron #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Meson #Nuclear physics #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Photon #Physics #Quantum #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Quantum chromodynamics #Quantum mechanics #Quark #Quark–gluon plasma #Strong interaction #hep-ex #hep-ph #nucl-ex
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/nature18011
published as Nature 534 (2016) no.7608, 487-493 · Fixed issue in document source that resulted in the omission of Fig. 3
openalex publication_date 2016/06/22 · arxiv created 2018/02/23 · arxiv updated 2018/02/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Just as Quantum Electrodynamics describes how electrons are bound in atoms by the electromagnetic force, mediated by exchange of photons, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) describes how quarks are bound inside hadrons by the strong force, mediated by exchange of gluons. At face value, QCD allows hadrons constructed from increasingly many quarks to exist, just as atoms with increasing numbers of electrons exist, yet such complex constructions seemed, until recently, to not be present in nature. In what follows we describe advances in the spectroscopy of mesons that are refining our understanding of the rules for building hadrons from QCD.