Speaker
Description
Improving the knowledge on how the strong interaction acts among hadrons is one of the frontiers in nuclear physics. A large amount of interactions among stable or unstable hadrons have not been measured yet and theoretical calculations with effective lagrangians and/or starting from first principles, with quarks and gluons as degrees of freedom, are still under development and in need of experimental data. For nucleons, scattering experiments and measurements of nuclei binding energies have been successfully employed in the past to constrain two- and three-body interactions but when hadrons containing at least one strange quark, such as hyperons, are involved, the experimental access becomes extremely challenging. The unstable nature of hyperon beams makes such measurements very difficult and significantly reduce the experimental data available. The strong interaction amongst strange hadrons and nucleons is particularly relevant in understanding the possible presence of hyperons in the core of neutron stars. Indeed, the strong interaction among hadrons, including hyperons, drives the equation of state of dense neutron-rich matter inside neutron stars. In this talk we show how with the measurement of correlation functions involving hyperons performed by the ALICE experiment in the last year allowed us to build a first realistic equations of state for neutron stars. New correlation measurements obtained in the on-going LHC Run 3 data-taking period will be discussed. This overview will show that the correlation technique paved a new era for hadron physics with the possibility of measuring with precision two- and three- body interactions in the strange sector and beyond.
