Gießen 2024 – scientific programme

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SYMD: SMuK Dissertation Prize 2024

SYMD 1: SMuK Dissertation Prize 2024

SYMD 1.4: Invited Talk

Monday, March 11, 2024, 15:45–16:15, HBR 14: HS 1

Unlocking the mysteries of nuclear interactions and their astrophysical impact — •Laura Šerkšnyte — Technical University of Munich

Detailed aspects of nuclear interactions drive the physics of several astrophysical phenomena which still elude a quantitative understanding. For instance, nuclear forces exhibit an effective short-range three-body component which contributes to the stability of nuclei but also determines the equation of state of neutron stars, if only hadrons are considered as constituents. For systems containing strange hadrons, these effective three-body forces are still completely unknown. Another example is the microscopic understanding of the light (anti)nuclei formation and their interactions with matter, necessary to ascertain expected cosmic ray antinuclei fluxes which constitute the main background for indirect dark matter searches using annihilation signatures in the Galaxy.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a perfect place to address these challenges in nuclear physics, as baryon triplets, including those containing strange quarks, and antinuclei can be abundantly produced and hence studied. In this talk, I will focus on two key results obtained from analyses of data collected with the ALICE detector at the LHC. The first result shows a novel method to study the interaction of unbound three-baryon systems such as p-p-p and p-p-Λ. The second result presents the first estimation of the transparency of our Galaxy to the passage of cosmic ray antinuclei on the basis of the measurements of inelastic antinuclei-nuclei cross sections at the LHC.

Keywords: femtoscopy; ALICE; three-body interactions; cosmic-ray antinuclei