Description
Understanding the dynamics of hadrons with different quark content is crucial to solve fundamental aspects of QCD as well as for the implications on the structure of dense stellar objects, such as neutron stars.
The scarce statistics collected in old scattering experiments for reactions involving unstable hadrons, in particular in the strange quark sector, strongly affect the accuracy of the current theoretical interaction models. Additionally, the modeling of dense nuclear matter requires a precise knowledge of three-body forces, for which a direct measurement is still missing.
In the past several years the use of correlation techniques, applied to particle pairs produced in high-energy collider experiments, have been proven capable of complementing and expanding the knowledge of hadronic interactions, especially in the strangeness sector. The present contribution provides an overview of the milestones reached by the ALICE Collaboration using the femtoscopy technique in pp collisions at √s=13 TeV. The main highlights are the unprecedented precision studies of the interaction of hadrons containing strange quarks, alongside the extension of the analysis methods to the three-body sector, aiming to experimentally probe the three-body interactions.
