Melting the vacuum
Johann Rafelski A · Physics World · 1998
Results presented at the Quark Matter 97 conference, held in December in Tsukuba, Japan, have provided new insights into the confinement of quarks in matter. The current physics paradigm is that the inertial masses of protons and neutrons, and hence of practically all of the matter around us, originate in the zero-point energy caused by the confinement of quarks inside the small volume of the nucleon. Today, 25 years after Harald Fritzsch, Heinrich Leutwyler and Murray Cell-Mann proposed quantum chromodynamics (QCD) as a means for understanding strongly interacting particles such as nucleons and mesons, our understanding of strong interactions and quark confinement remains incomplete.