Unveiling the strong interaction among hadrons at the LHC

One of the key challenges for nuclear physics today is to understand from first principles the effective interaction between hadrons with different quark content. First successes have been achieved using techniques that solve the dynamics of quarks and gluons on discrete space-time lattices1,2. Experimentally, the dynamics of the strong interaction have been studied by scattering hadrons off each other. Such scattering experiments are difficult or impossible for unstable hadrons3–6 and so high-quality measurements exist only for hadrons containing up and down quarks7. Here we demonstrate that measuring correlations in the momentum space between hadron pairs8–12 produced in ultrarelativistic…