Nuclear physics

The study of nuclear reactions and the measurement of their cross sections provide a direct link to understanding various astrophysical and cosmological mechanisms, such as the evolution of chemical species in our Galaxy and the nucleosynthesis that occurred during the Big Bang.

Moreover, understanding how nuclei fragment during interactions has important implications for medical applications, such as hadron therapy for cancer treatments. At higher energy scales, heavy ion collisions at the LHC can induce a peculiar nuclear state with very high energy density, known as quark-gluon plasma, which is believed to have existed in the very first moments of the Universe.