Colloquia

While nuclei form the core of matter, an understanding of their structure in terms of their fundamental constituents, quarks and gluons, is still well out of reach due to the complex nature of quark interactions in Quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Therefore, "effective" models of nuclei are needed as input for different measurements, from the simple collection of quasifree quarks used in high energy scattering measurements to complex shell structure studied in low energy nuclear physics. These models are useful because of the large separation between the natural energy and distance scales associated with QCD, nuclear binding, and atomic physics. However, there are regions where interactions at vastly different scales have non-trivial interactions which can be seen in high-precision measurements or for specific, well-chosen observables. I will provide some examples of this mixing of energy scales and then focus on the overlap between the scales relevant for nuclear structure and those probed in medium- and high-energy studies of nucleon structure. High-density configurations and large virtual excitations in nuclei provide increased interplay between nuclear scales and QCD, providing opportunities for higher energy measurements to probe details of nuclear structure, and yielding phenomena where low energy nuclear structure may impact the quark description of matter.