The NZ24 department was established in 2015 by separating experimental groups from the existing NZ21 department. The basic activity of the Department is related to the development of various experimental techniques, the preparation and conduct of experiments and the analysis of the results obtained. The department is interested in a wide spectrum of nuclear reactions and hadronic processes. The simplest of the studied reactions, involving only a few nucleons, using mathematically exact calculations based on Faddeev’s equations, serve as a tool for studying several-nucleon dynamics, with particular emphasis on the so-called 3-nucleon force. Elementary collisions (nucleon-nucleon or pion-nucleon) at energies of several GeV are, in turn, the basic tool for studying the so-called baryon resonances (excited states of the nucleon), also baryons containing a strange quark. Knowledge of their properties is crucial to understanding quantum chromodynamics – the quantum field theory for the strong interaction.
Much more complicated reactions, involving one or even two heavy ions, provide data for the validation of various thermodynamic or hydrodynamic models describing the processes of spallation, decay and multifragmentation of nuclei. Precisely selected reactions between specific isotopes allow us to study the mysterious nature of the so-called symmetry energy, whose dependence on the density of nuclear matter is one of the most desirable information both in classical nuclear physics and in astrophysics.
A significant part of the department’s activities is related to other hadronic processes, such as the production of mesons or the decay of free neutrons. Especially the latter, by measuring the directional correlations between the particles produced in the decay, or measuring the electric dipole moment of the neutron, provides information of fundamental importance for understanding and constructing theories describing the world of elementary particles.
The physicists of the NZ24 department participate in several international experiments, like: HADES, ASY-EOS, SPiRIT, PANDA.