hadronische

Hadronische, in English usually rendered as hadronic, refers to anything related to hadrons, the class of subatomic particles composed of quarks bound by the strong interaction. Hadrons include baryons, such as protons and neutrons (three quarks), and mesons, such as pions and kaons (quark–antiquark pairs). Hadrons carry color charge and participate in strong interactions, while not appearing as free particles due to color confinement. The properties of hadrons arise from Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong force, which describes how quarks and gluons interact. At high energies, quarks and gluons behave as partons, while at low energies they form bound states.

Hadronic physics encompasses hadron spectroscopy, decays, scattering cross sections, and phenomena such as hadronization, the process by which quarks and gluons produced in high-energy reactions form hadrons. Experimental study occurs in hadron colliders (like the LHC) and fixed-target experiments, with detectors designed to identify hadrons and reconstruct jets.

Theoretical approaches include perturbative QCD for high-momentum transfers, and non-perturbative methods such as lattice QCD and effective field theories for low-energy hadrons. Hadronic matter also plays a central role in nuclear physics and astrophysics; for example, dense hadronic matter in neutron stars and the formation of a quark-gluon plasma in heavy-ion collisions.

The term is used in several languages, including Dutch, where hadronic is translated as hadronische, to distinguish hadron-related phenomena from leptonic or electromagnetic processes.