When you break an atom, you see electrons, protons and neutrons as free particles but when you break a proton its quarks and gluons rearrange into new hadrons. Quarks and gluons are permanently confined in hadrons.
This is a mind-boggling property of the strong force, and it remains one of its most elusive ones. Proving confinement is the core of one Millennium Prize Problem stated by the Clay Mathematics Institute that requires proving “Yang-Mills existence and mass gap”. The strong force is just one of many types of strong forces that Nature might employ.
Theoretical and experimental results call for the existence of new forces to explain Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Hadron dynamics can be used as an analogue computer to learn about the dynamics of these new strong forces so that they can be confronted with experiments. Additionally, the use of limits in theory space allows for gaining a qualitative and quantitative understanding of the strong force. String theory itself was originally introduced to describe ordinary hadrons.
Here the project focuses on the unexplored Corrigan and Ramond large number of colours limit that holds the key to discovering novel properties of hadron dynamics and connecting QCD and Supersymmetry.