Research

At the fundamental level, quarks and gluons are the building blocks of the nuclear constituents, neutrons and protons. Part of my research is devoted to understanding how nuclei emerge from the underlying theory of the strong interaction, Quantum Chromodynamics, which describes the complicated quark-gluon dynamics.

I am also interested in the description of weak interaction processes responsible for the decay of hypernuclei, exotic nuclei composed of neutrons, protons and their strange extensions, hyperons.

Strangeness physics

The conventional matter is built from neutrons and protons, bound states of three quarks of flavors up and down. More exotic systems are expected to populate the interior of compact stellar environments, where specific temperature and pressure conditions happen. These systems include, for instance, bound states of strange quarks, known as hyperons. Several experimental facilities can also produce hyperons, and bind them in nuclei, the so-called hypernuclei. Such systems are unstable against the weak interaction, and from the study of such decays, we can learn about both the strong and the weak interaction among hyperons and nucleons.

Lattice QCD simulations of hadronic interactions at low energies

A central goal of Nuclear Physics is to obtain a first-principles description of the properties and interactions of nuclei from the underlying theory of the strong interaction, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). Being the theory that governs the interactions between the basic building blocks of matter, quarks and gluons, it is also responsible for confining those primary pieces into hadronic states, binding neutrons and protons through the nuclear force to give the different elements in the periodic table. Nevertheless, due to the complexity of the quark-gluon dynamics, one cannot obtain analytical solutions of QCD in the energy regime relevant for nuclear physics. In order to address this problem, as a member of the Nuclear Physics with Lattice QCD Collaboration (NPLQCD), I use supercomputers to numerically solve QCD in a finite volume, through its formulation in a Euclidean discretized space-time.