Proceedings

EPJ ST Highlight - Examining recent developments in Quantum Chromodynamics

The strong nuclear force is responsible for binding together quarks, the basic building blocks of protons and neutrons, that comprise almost all of the visible matter. A new collection looks at recent development in the field of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) from a range of perspectives.

Created as an analogy for Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) — which describes the interactions due to the electromagnetic force carried by photons — Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is the theory of physics that explains the interactions mediated by the strong force — one of the four fundamental forces of nature.

A new collection of papers published in EPJ Special Topics, and edited by Diogo Boito, Instituto de Fisica de Sao Carlos, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Irinel Caprini, Horia Hulubei National Institute for Physics and Nuclear Engineering, Bucharest, Romania, brings together recent developments in the investigation of QCD.

The editors explain in a special introduction to the collection that due to a much stronger coupling in the strong force — carried by gluons between quarks, forming the fundamental building blocks of matter — described by QCD, than the electromagnetic force, the divergence of perturbation expansions in the mathematical descriptions of a system can have important physical consequences. The editors point out that this has become increasingly relevant with recent high-precision calculations in QCD, due to advances in the so-called higher-order loop computations.

“The fact that the perturbative expansions in QCD are divergent strongly affects the renormalization scheme and scale dependence of the truncated expansions, which represents a major source of uncertainty in the theoretical predictions of the standard model,” Boito and Caprini, write. “Understanding and taming this behaviour is, therefore, one of the main challenges for precision QCD to match the requirements of future accelerator facilities.”

In the special edition, this and other topics relating to QCD such as the mathematical theory of resurgence and the existence of infrared (IR) and ultraviolet (UV) renormalons are addressed by a cadre of experts in the field.

These problems are tackled from a variety of angles and in the context of related quantum field theories from what the editors say is a more fundamental viewpoint or a phenomenological approach.

All articles are available here and are freely accessible until 13 February 2022. For further information read the Editorial by D. Boito and I. Caprini on Renormalons and hyperasymptotics in QCD. Eur. Phys. J. Spec. Top. 230, 2561–2563 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-021-00276-w

This was our first experience of publishing with EPJ Web of Conferences. We contacted the publisher in the middle of September, just one month prior to the Conference, but everything went through smoothly. We have had published MNPS Proceedings with different publishers in the past, and would like to tell that the EPJ Web of Conferences team was probably the best, very quick, helpful and interactive. Typically, we were getting responses from EPJ Web of Conferences team within less than an hour and have had help at every production stage.
We are very thankful to Solange Guenot, Web of Conferences Publishing Editor, and Isabelle Houlbert, Web of Conferences Production Editor, for their support. These ladies are top-level professionals, who made a great contribution to the success of this issue. We are fully satisfied with the publication of the Conference Proceedings and are looking forward to further cooperation. The publication was very fast, easy and of high quality. My colleagues and I strongly recommend EPJ Web of Conferences to anyone, who is interested in quick high-quality publication of conference proceedings.

On behalf of the Organizing and Program Committees and Editorial Team of MNPS-2019, Dr. Alexey B. Nadykto, Moscow State Technological University “STANKIN”, Moscow, Russia. EPJ Web of Conferences vol. 224 (2019)

ISSN: 2100-014X (Electronic Edition)

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