"Exotic Hadrons: What's New in an Old Spectroscopy? " by Prof. Stephen Godfrey (Carelton University, Ottawa, Canada)

Thursday Feb 5, 2015, 3:30 PM → 4:30 PM Pacific/Honolulu

112 (Watanabe)

In the last ten years there has been an explosion of newly discovered exotic mesons that do not fit into our current understanding of QCD, the theory of the strong interactions. The speculation is that we've discovered new forms of hadronic matter; hadronic molecules, tetraquarks and mesons with excited gluonic degrees of freedom. To understand the issues I'll start with an introduction to the standard model of elementary particle physics and Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong interactions, and describe our current understanding of hadrons and the pressing questions in strong interaction physics. I will then survey the recent experimental results that are challenging our models of hadrons, the exotic explanations proposed to reconcile theory and experiment, and how we can distinguish between the different theoretical interpretations. I will finish with how we can solve these puzzles through both theoretical and experimental progress in the coming years.

Slides Exotic_Hadrons_Hawaii_Colloquium_2015.pdf