Understanding the origin of mass in QCD is one of the central goals of modern nuclear physics. Importantly, most of the mass of visible matter does not come from the Higgs mechanism or from the small masses of the up and down quarks. Instead, it emerges dynamically from QCD through quark-gluon interactions, confinement, and spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking.
There is no single experimental technique that directly "measures the origin of mass." Rather, several complementary approaches probe different aspects of the problem. The goal of this workshop is to bring people involved in different approaches together and try to understand the complementarity of different techniques.
Today, the most promising experimental routes to understanding the origin of QCD mass include:
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Threshold J/ψJ/ψ production → direct probe of gluonic mass generation and the trace anomaly.
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Exclusive electron scattering (DVCS, vector mesons) → access to energy-momentum tensor form factors, pressure, and mass distributions.
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Precision DIS at the EIC → determine how quarks and gluons generate the proton's mass, momentum, and structure.
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Hadron spectroscopy → reveal how confinement generates hadron masses.
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Heavy-ion collisions → study what happens when the mechanisms responsible for mass generation are switched off.
Together, these approaches attack the same fundamental question from different angles: how mass emerges from nearly massless quarks and massless gluons through the dynamics of QCD.
Based on this big picture, we host a 3-4 day workshop. There should be time for discussion after each talk and then a recap or a broader discussion at end of the day.