Welcome to the website of the Krusche Group
at the Department of Physics,
University of Basel!
The main research topic of our group is the structure of hadrons (nucleons
and mesons) which reflects the properties of the strong interaction.
This interaction - one of the four fundamental forces of nature -
is responsible for binding together protons and neutrons to form atomic nuclei.
But it also dictates the internal structure of protons and neutrons, which
- like all hadrons - are composed of elementary particles called quarks.
Unlike any other composite system, most of the mass of hadrons
is not related to the mass of it's building blocks - the quarks -
but generated by their interaction.
As an example, the sum of the masses of the three quarks forming
a proton, contributes only about 0.6% - 1.8% to the total proton mass.
More than 98% of the mass of ordinary matter arise from
dynamical effects of the strong interaction.
At present, most of our experiments are done in the framework of international
collaborations (
Crystal Ball at MAMI,
Crystal Barrel at ELSA ,
TAPS ) at
the electron accelerators
MAMI
and
ELSA .
Our group is furthermore involved in the
PANDA-project
at GSI, where from the second half of
this decade an Anti-Proton beam will be available for hadron structure experiments.