This Cluster of Excellence focuses on the interplay between strong and weak interactions – a central challenge for the precision physics of the future. The focus is on the physics of quarks and the question of how these fundamental building blocks of matter form complex bonding states. At the same time, the properties of the Higgs boson will be investigated and the search for the axion will be continued.

With the masses of the six known quarks spanning several orders of magnitude, the experimental infrastructure needed to study them ranges from experiments at low-to-medium energy levels at the ELSA particle accelerator in Bonn all the way through to ultra-high-energy experiments using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, which will also offer an opportunity to investigate the Higgs boson. The chosen research approach relies on a close partnership between theory and experimentation.

Prof. Dr. Stefan Krieg is Principal Investigator for JSC and, together with his team, will contribute to the Cluster of Excellence “Color Meets Flavor” mainly focusing on research into bound states of light and heavy quarks (Research Area 1) and on computational methods (Technology Area 2).