TA-WKS-2019-012

Despite the successes of the Standard Model of particle physics, it remains a challenge to understand the dynamics of the strong interaction among quarks and gluons. At small distance scales or at high energies, the underlying theory, the Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), is well tested and understood. Our understanding of the strong interaction deteriorates dramatically at larger distances scales such as the size of the nucleon. This "strong QCD regime” exhibits spectacular effects such as the generation of hadron masses and color confinement. Moreover, the nature of QCD implies the existence of gluon-rich hadrons, such as glueballs and hybrids, multi-quark states, and molecules. The annihilation of matter with antimatter in the mass regime of charmonium has proven to be an ideal environment to discover new forms of hadronic matter. Experiments using electron-positron annihilations at energies in the charmonium-mass regime conducted with the BESIII spectrometer (Beijing, China) revealed a complete new class of hidden-charm matter. A complementary research program is in development with the aim to collide an intense beam of cooled anti-protons with protons or nuclei. This experiment, called PANDA at FAIR, has the ambition to carry out comprehensive spectroscopy studies of hadrons in the strange, charm, and gluon-rich regimes. In this talk, I will highlight the recent discoveries made by BESIII and give perspectives of PANDA in this exciting field of research.