Trinity’s Prof. Stefan Sint, along with collaborators from Germany, Spain and Italy, has published the most precise determination to date of the strong coupling constant. This parameter governs the interactions between quarks and gluons, the fundamental components of nuclear matter. The new result halves the error of all previous experimental measurements combined, setting a new benchmark for the Standard Model, which summarizes our current knowledge of elementary particle physics.

This advance will improve our understanding of how quarks and gluons behave inside protons and enable high-precision measurements of the Higgs boson and its properties. More generally, improved quantitative control of the strong interactions increases the likelihood of discovering effects of yet unknown physics at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Prof. Sint from Trinity’s School of Mathematics was one of the researchers whose landmark results were published in Nature.