The selection by the European Research Council (ERC), which decided to support the project of young and promising scientist Dr. Raffaele Del Grande from Department of Physics at FNSPE CTU, can be considered as a huge success! The Council selected from a total of 3,928 applications from around the world and decided to support only four young scientists in the Czech Republic, who will receive Starting Grants, with the only one physics-focused project being Raffaele Del Grande's "Hunting three-body forces (HUNTING-3BFs)".
Hunting three-body forces
The HUNTING-3BFs research project addresses one of the major open questions in nuclear physics: how three particles interact simultaneously inside atomic and exotic nuclei. These so-called three-body forces (3BFs) play a crucial role in understanding the behaviour of nuclear matter, from the smallest nuclei to extremely dense and compact objects in the Universe, such as neutron stars.
A key objective of the project is to study the three-body force involving the Λ hyperon (a particle containing two light quarks and one strange quark) and nucleons (protons and neutrons). This force is currently very poorly understood and its study may help to reconcile the observation of very massive neutron stars with the expected production of Λ hyperons in their interiors.
The project’s main goal is to study and describe these three-body forces, using for the first time direct three-particle scattering data. To achieve this, HUNTING-3BFs will make use of the high-statistics data from the ALICE experiment, where new techniques allow researchers to investigate interactions between three particles produced at the femtometer scale in ultrarelativistic collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN.
The team will explore how 3BFs vary with energy and distance by analysing particle triplets emitted in both small and large collision systems, such as pp and Pb-Pb. This will provide new insights into how nuclear matter behaves under different conditions. By delivering the first experimentally established models of three-body nuclear forces with Λ hyperons, HUNTING-3BFs aims to transform our understanding of nuclear matter with strange quark content and make a strong impact on nuclear physics, astrophysics, and beyond.
About the ERC
The ERC, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe. The ERC offers four core grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants and Synergy Grants. With its additional Proof of Concept Grant scheme, the ERC helps grantees to bridge the gap between their pioneering research and early phases of its commercialisation. The ERC is led by an independent governing body, the Scientific Council. Maria Leptin has been the President of the ERC since November 2021. The overall ERC budget from 2021 to 2027 is more than €16 billion, as part of the Horizon Europe programme, which is under the responsibility of Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation.