A meson is often pictured as a simple two-body system: a quark bound to an antiquark by the strong force. Because of this simplicity, mesons have been used with great success to investigate properties of the strong force. This has parallels to the way the hydrogen atom (another two-body system: proton and electron) was historically used to investigate the electromagnetic force. Recently, however, with the collection of large samples of data by a variety of experiments around the world, this simple picture of mesons has apparently started to break down. In this talk, I will briefly survey both the simplicity and, perhaps more importantly, the newly emerging complexity of the meson system.
1080 Physics Research Building, Smith Seminar room - reception at 3:30pm in front of the SSR Department of Physics physics@osu.edu America/New_York publicA meson is often pictured as a simple two-body system: a quark bound to an antiquark by the strong force. Because of this simplicity, mesons have been used with great success to investigate properties of the strong force. This has parallels to the way the hydrogen atom (another two-body system: proton and electron) was historically used to investigate the electromagnetic force. Recently, however, with the collection of large samples of data by a variety of experiments around the world, this simple picture of mesons has apparently started to break down. In this talk, I will briefly survey both the simplicity and, perhaps more importantly, the newly emerging complexity of the meson system.
