This three-year award supports US-Portuguese collaborative research in the area of hadronic physics between Stephen Cotanch and Eric Swanson of North Carolina State University and Jose Ribeiro of the Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon. The objectives of their research are to study problems in Quantum Chromodynamics (QDC) related to the structure of mesons and baryons, and to determine experimental signatures for glueballs, hybrid mesons, and the strangeness content of the nucleon. The project will combine an effective, field theoretical Hamiltonian from QCD combined with phenomenological insights derived from chiral symmetry. It will incorporate precise, new experimental information from the Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and Brookhaven National Laboratory.
The US investigators and their students bring to this collaboration strengths in many-body and field theory and phenomenology. This is complemented by the Portuguese calculational expertise and an extension of their meson-baryon codes to accommodate an improved theoretical treatment and a focus on the implications of chiral symmetry.
