Nuclear Physics Might Hold The Key To Cracking Open The Standard Model (Synopsis) [Starts With A Bang]

“It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.” -Ernest Rutherford

Nuclear physics has, for decades now, been regarded less as a window into fundamental physics and more of a derived science. As we’ve discovered that nuclei, baryons, and mesons are all composite particles made out of quarks, antiquarks, and gluons, though, we’ve realized that there are other possible combinations that nature allows, that should exist.

In recent years, we’ve discovered tetraquark and pentaquark states of quarks and antiquarks, and yet there should be even more. QCD, our theory of the strong interactions, predicts that a set of exotic states of bound gluons — known as a glueball — should exist. Finding them, or proving that they don’t exist, might be a way to crack open the Standard Model in an entirely new way.

Nuclear physics might, after all these years, hold the key to going beyond the current limitations of physics.