The Quantum Strong Force
Please join us at the next Saturday Morning of Theoretical Physics to hear lectures on The Quantum Strong Force this upcoming Michaelmas Term: 25th October, 2025. Please check back on this page to learn more information as it is released, and register at the link below. The event has now finished and the link has been removed.
Speakers
Quantum entanglement at the highest energies Please use the link here to access the talk
Prof Alan Barr
Quantum systems are weird. Parts of quantum systems can be entangled - coupled so tightly together that it’s not meaningful to describe the whole in terms of its constituents. These weird properties are at the heart of modern quantum technology. Since quantum mechanics forms the basis of quantum field theories we should also expect the subatomic particles of the Standard Model to have these features. In this talk I will describe how we can treat the Large Hadron Collider as a machine to process quantum information. By doing so we can detect entanglement and related quantum phenomena at the highest experimentally accessible energies. These tests, which probe tiny distances - much smaller than the size of the proton - allow us to push at the bounds of validity of the quantum theory.
The Strong Force Across Scales: Quantum Simplified Please use the link here to access the talk
Prof Gavin Salam
High-energy particle collisions set the stage for the quantum strong force to play out across enormous ranges of space and time. Understanding and predicting the resulting complexity is essential for exploring many fundamental questions at the Large Hadron Collider. Strikingly, when the strong interactions stretch across many scales, aspects that seem deeply quantum begin to simplify and take on a classical character. This talk will explore where the strong force behaves in unmistakably quantum ways, where it can be treated as classical, and what challenges remain in bridging the two.
Quantum Chromodynamics: Understanding the Strong Force Please use the link here to access the talk
Prof Fabrizio Caola
T The strong interaction - one of nature’s four fundamental forces - binds quarks and gluons into protons, neutrons, and ultimately all atomic nuclei. It accounts for nearly all the mass of ordinary matter, making it central to our existence. Yet fully uncovering its quantum structure remains one of the great challenges in modern physics.
Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory describing the strong force, unites quantum mechanics and special relativity in a single elegant framework. Even though QCD recently marked its 50th anniversary, it continues to captivate physicists with its intricate interplay of confinement, asymptotic freedom, and emergent phenomena across vast energy scales.
In this talk, I will introduce the core ideas of QCD and show how its quantum nature manifests in high-energy experiments such as those at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). I will highlight recent advances that sharpen our understanding of the strong force, setting the stage for deeper explorations of quantum information at the smallest scales and the emergence of classical behaviour from underlying quantum dynamics.
