The determination of the three-dimensional structure of hadrons in terms of the fundamental quark and gluon (or parton) degrees of freedom of QCD is a central mission of the Jefferson Lab science program.
Hadron spectroscopy is key to understanding of the enigmatic properties of QCD, such as confinement, dynamical chiral symmetry breaking, emergence of topological matter, etc.
The research activity in this area deals, in broad terms, with the fundamental issue of understanding the structure and dynamics of nuclei in terms of the many-body (primarily, two- and three-body) strong forces governing the interactions among their constituents, i.e., the nucleons, and the response of nuclei to electromagnetic and weak probes in terms of the coupling of these probes to individual nucleons and
This effort concerns the spectrum of excited mesons and baryons and is a theoretical counterpoint to experimental efforts at Jefferson Lab and other facilities.