In order to celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, the Institute of Cosmos Sciences releases each day of this week one piece on one of its most renowned researchers.

Today we look into Assumpta Parreño research:

Position: Associate Professor and deputy director of our Institute.

Field: Hadronic, nuclear and Atomic Physics

Research: Assumpta has focused her research career on understanding how nuclei emerge from the interactions between the fundamental degrees of freedom of matter. Subatomic particles, like neutrons and protons, are not elementary. They can be understood as made up of three quarks, which come in different flavors, giving rise to the different types of particles.

One of the fundamental forces in Nature, the strong force, is responsible for binding these quarks into nucleons. The underlying theory (widely accepted) describing the interactions among quarks is Quantum Chromodynamics, according to which, quarks interact through the exchange of massless elementary particles, the gluons.

Unfortunately, at the energy scales in which nuclear phenomena take place, the theory cannot be solved analytically. With the goal of obtaining numerical solutions to the problem,

Assumpta cofounded in 2004 the international Nuclear Physics with Lattice QCD collaboration. Since then, she has joined several initiatives to use super computation to obtain information about how nuclear particles interact, a framework especially relevant on those sectors where experiments are difficult, or even impossible, to perform.

You can watch her describe her research in the following video (in Spanish):