At IFUNAM, quantum phenomena associated with electromagnetic and weak interactions of elementary particles are studied. The theoretical description is encompassed in the so-called standard model of elementary particles, which until now is capable of describing all phenomena of this type observed by experiments. Possible discrepancies between theory and experiment would indicate the presence of new phenomena related to extensions of the standard model, so theoretical efforts are made to obtain very high precision predictions and compare with measurements, such as: the weak mixing angle, the magnetic moment muon anomaly, quark mixing matrix elements, symmetry violation, etc.
Hadronic physics studies the structure and properties of the bound states of quarks, which are dominated by the strong interaction, whose corresponding theory is Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). A peculiarity of the strong interaction is that, at low scales, the coupling constant is large, which does not allow the perturbative study of the QCD Lagrangian. Hadron phenomenology is developed in this QCD regime. The various theoretical, experimental or phenomenological approaches allow us to know, for example, more about the proton or the pion. At IFUNAM, in addition to QCD, we focus on quark models, effective theories, as well as phenomenological fit of distribution functions.
The experimental information is obtained from experiments on colliders such as LHCb, CMS, ATLAS, Belle, Babar and low energy experiments such as at the Jefferson Lab and RHIC.
