At the end of February, the results of the SONATA BIS 15 competition organised by the National Science Centre were announced. Among the projects selected for funding were two initiatives by scientists from the Department of Fundamental Research at the National Centre for Nuclear Research.

The SONATA BIS competition is aimed at research teams conducting fundamental research. The total budget for the competition is PLN 170 million. Last week, the results of the latest, 15th edition were announced. Seventy projects were selected for funding, two of which were authored by scientists from the National Centre for Nuclear Research, who obtained nearly PLN 3,5 million for their research.

The head of the first of the approved projects is dr hab. inż. Paweł Sznajder from the Theoretical Physics Division at NCBJ. The research programme entitled "Modern phenomenology and global extraction of generalised parton distributions" will help to better understand the structure of the basic building blocks of matter. The research will use the formalism of generalised parton distributions (GPDs), which provides a theoretical framework for analysing the three-dimensional structure of nucleons. – The project will allow us to perform global fits of GPDs and determine the related physical quantities. In particular, we will be able to determine the spatial distribution of quarks and gluons, as well as investigate the contribution of their orbital angular momentum to the proton spin. In our analysis, we will use not only experimental data, but also the results of calculations on lattices (lattice QCD) – explains the project manager. The programme will contribute to the development of lattice QCD calculations and current and future particle physics and high-energy experiments, including the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) being built in the USA. The results obtained in the project will allow us to advance our understanding of the matter that makes up the entire visible Universe.

The second selected NCBJ project is „Investigating the structure of hadrons using semi-leptonic baryon decays” led by dr Varvara Batozskaya from the High Energy Physics Division at NCBJ. It concerns the study of decays of baryons (a family of particles including protons and neutrons) containing strange or charm quarks. Scientists will utilise the fact that the spin of baryons can have a specific direction – be "polarised" – which allows them to discover details of their internal structure and decay dynamics. – The project will involve research at two world-class facilities. One of them will be Beijing Spectrometer III (BESIII) at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing, which allows us to reconstruct the production and decay of baryons, enabling us to measure the functions describing their structure. The second research centre is FAIR in Germany, where the Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment is being prepared. The experiment will allow us to record a huge number of rare baryon decays, including semi-leptonic decays of hyperons, with unprecedented precision – explains dr Varvara Batozskaya. The work will enable independent verification of key parameters of the Standard Model and may reveal hints to the discovery of new physics.

Congratulations on the grants and we wish you success in your research!