Welcome to the PartonicNucleus research project page.
The objective of the PartonicNucleus research project is to understand the structure of nuclei in terms of quarks and gluons. It is indeed well known that nuclei are formed of protons and neutrons, themselves formed of quarks and gluons. Nevertheless, we know that the quark structure of protons and neutrons is modified in the nuclear medium. This phenomenon, confirmed many times since its discovery in 1983, has evaded our understanding for many years. Many theoretical models have been proposed, but have eventually been largely invalidated by experiments.
With the PartonicNucleus project, we will build a new detector called ALERT (A Low Energy Recoil Tracker) and carry out a series of experiments aimed at observing different aspects of the nuclear structure directly at the level of quarks and gluons, ignoring the proton and neutron level. The results of these measurements should give new strong constraints on the types of acceptable theoretical models and thus guide future research on the subject.
This project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 804480).