Affiliation: Universidad de Valencia

Fields or areas of research Hadronic physics , Effective theories

Raquel Molina Peralta obtained a doctorate degree from the University of Valencia in 2012. After finishing her undergraduate studies in Physics, she specialized in Theoretical Physics, having obtained a Master's degree in Advanced Physics in 2007 at UV. She has also carried out several postdoctoral research stays in international centers, such as the Research Center for Nuclear Physics in Osaka (Japan), The George Washington University, Washington DC (USA), and the Physics Institute of the University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo (Brazil). In 2019 she returned to Spain thanks to the Talento program of the Community of Madrid, where she worked at the Complutense University of Madrid. In 2020 she was selected by the CIDEGENT program of the Generalitat Valenciana. Thanks to this program, she continues her work as a researcher and also teaches at the University of Valencia and IFIC.

During her research career in the area of Particle Physics, she has worked continuously making contributions in the field of hadronic spectroscopy, and more occasionally in nuclear physics. Her research is focused on understanding the subtleties of the strong interaction at low and intermediate energies, where is possible to study it through effective theories. The strong interaction occurs between some of the fundamental particles such as the proton and the pion, generally called hadrons, and it is responsible for the formation of matter as we conceive it around us. The study of the dynamics of the strong interaction also gives rise to the formation of particles that are called exotic or that cannot be described as basic hadrons, such as the tetraquark X0 (2866) and pentaquark Pc (2450) discovered by the LHCb in 2020. and 2015 respectively, and that Raquel and her collaborators predicted while she was completing her doctorate.

She also works on the analysis of data from LatticeQCD simulations and experimental reactions involving hadrons, where she applies machine learning techniques.

Thanks to the CIDEGENT program, Raquel continues her research and carries out her own project, with a doctoral student in charge of her.