Study of the strong interaction among hadrons with correlations at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent results from the ALICE Collaboration at the LHC, demonstrating how correlation measurements in high-energy collisions provide new insights into the strong interactions among various hadron pairs, including unstable ones.

Contribution

It introduces and discusses a novel method using momentum space correlations in collider experiments to study the strong interaction among hadrons, including unstable species.

Findings

Correlation analysis reveals strong interaction details for hyperon-nucleon pairs

Method enables measurement of residual strong interactions for any hadron pair

Results include insights into hyperon-hyperon and kaon-nucleon interactions

Abstract

The strong interaction among hadrons has been measured in the past by scattering experiments. Although this technique has been extremely successful in providing information about the nucleon-nucleon and pion-nucleon interactions, when unstable hadrons are considered the experiments become more challenging. In the last few years, the analysis of correlations in the momentum space for pairs of stable and unstable hadrons measured in pp and p-Pb collisions by the ALICE Collaboration at the LHC has provided a new method to investigate the strong interaction among hadrons. In this article, we review the numerous results recently achieved for hyperon-nucleon, hyperon-hyperon, and kaon-nucleon pairs, which show that this new method opens the possibility of measuring the residual strong interaction of any hadron pair.