Speaker
Description
The proton is the most common element of the visible universe, yet we
don't know how to reconstruct its macroscopic properties (mass, spin,..)
from the elementary degrees of freedom of the Strong Interaction, the
quarks and gluons (collectively, partons) of QCD. Partons are not
visible, they are confined inside hadrons because at hadronic mass
scales QCD is highly nonlinear and not calculable. From phenomenological
analyses of experimental data one can extract nonperturbative maps of
the dynamics of confined partons. In particular, transverse-momentum
dependent parton distributions (TMDs) generalize the standard collinear
parton distribution functions (PDFs) by informing on partonic 3D
momenta. Recent extractions of unpolarized TMDs have reached a
theoretical accuracy comparable to modern PDFs. Our group is recognized
world leader in the study of TMDs and (polarized) "exotic" PDFs, that
are relevant for Standard Model precision studies at the LHC and for
explorations of new physics beyond it, respectively.
