Physics Colloquium

John Arrington
Argonne National Laboratory

Clusters, Correlations, and Quarks: A High-Energy Perspective on Nuclei

The dramatic separation of energy scales between the interactions that bind atoms, nuclei and quarks yields remarkable simplifications in the study of the nature of matter. Quark structure is essentially irrelevant when dealing with protons and neutrons in nuclei, while the rich details of nuclear structure all but disappear when studying atomic interactions.

Exceptions to this factorized picture of matter allow for interesting measurements of nuclear structure using either very low or very high energy probes, and may also lead to cases where clustering phenomena in nuclei can impact the quark distributions probed at high energies. I will begin by giving some examples of phenomena which overlap these disparate energy scales, and then focus on the case of extremely high-density clusters in nuclei.