Hadron Physics Opportunities at FAIR with Proton and Pion Beams

Abstract The Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) is a nuclear physics facility currently under construction at GSI in Germany, aimed at advancing fundamental research. FAIR will enable novel studies of matter under extreme conditions, replicating the environments found in neutron stars and their mergers. In addition, one of FAIR’s scientific missions is to explore the exotic landscape and the properties of nuclei containing strangeness, i.e. hypernuclei. Connected to this, FAIR offers opportunities for hadron physics research, enabling the study of strongly interacting matter in the field of non-perturbative QCD using, in particular, high-intensity proton and pion beams. Integrating hadron, heavy-ion, and nuclear physics in one facility allows to probe matter from multiple angles with shared and versatile detector systems. This proceeding outlines the capabilities of FAIR for fundamental hadron physics research, presenting both the infrastructure and key highlights of the physics program. An overview of studies aimed at understanding e.g. baryon interactions is given and preliminary results from ongoing feasibility studies are presented.