We briefly review common features and overlapping issues in hadron and flavor physics focussing on continuum QCD approaches to heavy bound states, their mass spectrum and weak decay constants in different strong interaction models.
Relativistic nuclear collisions offer a unique way to study strong interactions at very high energy. The collision process can be described within the gluon saturation framework as the interaction of two colored glasses, and because of this interaction strong longitudinal gluon fields, namely the Glasma, are produced immediately after the collision. Besides, heavy quarks are also produced in the very early stage and because of their large mass and small concentration, their motion does not affect the evolution of the Glasma, thus behaving as ideal probes of the Glasma itself. We study the evolution of the heavy quarks in the Glasma allegedly produced in high energy p-Pb collisions by solving consistently the equations of motion of the quarks in the evolving Glasma fields. We find that this motion can be understood in terms of diffusion in momentum space, similarly to the random motion of a heavy probe in a hot thermalized medium. We show how the diffusion of heavy probes affects the nuclear modification factor of D and B mesons in p-Pb collisions.
Entanglement suppression in the strong interaction $S$-matrix is shown to be correlated with approximate spin-flavor symmetries that are observed in low-energy baryon interactions, the Wigner $SU(4)$ symmetry for two flavors and an $SU(16)$ symmetry for three flavors. We conjecture that dynamical entanglement suppression is a property of the strong interactions in the infrared, giving rise to these emergent symmetries and providing powerful constraints on the nature of nuclear and hypernuclear forces in dense matter.
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN will open a new energy domain for heavy-ion physics. Besides ALICE, the dedicated heavy-ion experiment, also ATLAS and CMS are preparing rich physics programs with nucleus-nucleus collisions. Here we focus on open heavy-flavour and quarkonia studies, among the fields that will most benefit from the high centre-of-mass energy at the LHC. We discuss a few examples of physics issues that can be addressed and we present a selection and comparison (where possible) of results on the expected capability of the three experiments.
We calculate the rates of the radiative transitions np -> 1s + gamma in kaonic hydrogen and kaonic deuterium, induced by strong low-energy interactions and enhanced by Coulomb interactions. The obtained results should be taken into account for the theoretical analysis of the experimental data on the X-ray spectra and yields in kaonic atoms.
Results on open charm and beauty production and on the search for top production in high-energy electron-proton collisions at HERA are reviewed. This includes a discussion of relevant theoretical aspects, a summary of the available measurements and measurement techniques, and their impact on improved understanding of QCD and its parameters, such as parton density functions and charm- and beauty-quark masses. The impact of these results on measurements at the LHC and elsewhere is also addressed.