NPA Seminar: Yacine Mehtar Tani, Brookhaven National Laboratory, “Exploring the proton structure: from partons to strong gauge fields”
At short distances, the proton consists of weakly interacting point-like quarks and gluons, aka partons. At high energy this picture of the proton is expected to break down before confining forces take over when soft enough gluons, that are abundantly present inside the proton, interact in a non-linear fashion. This regime of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is known as the saturation regime and is best described by strong classical gauge fields.