Hadronic physics studies the structure, the properties and the interactions of the hadrons in terms of quarks and gluons. The underlying theory is the Quantum Chromo-Dynamics (QCD) which, according to the domains of energy/distance, baryonic density, temperature… leads to a multitude of phenomena : from the confinement of quarks and gluons inside the nucleons which form ordinary matter, to the quark gluon plasma where the latter appear as a soup of (quasi-) free elementary particles.

In the domain of nucleon structure, an important experimental program which has been conducted for many years at the electron accelerator of the Jefferson Lab (USA) with its 6 GeV beam and which will be continued with its upgrade at 12 GeV, consists in measuring the Generalized Parton Distributions (DVCS experiments) which characterize the momentum-position correlations of the quarks inside the nucleon.

The HADES experiment (at GSI, Germany), with several GeV heavy ions beam on fixed targets and the detection of leptons pairs, aims at measuring the effect of the nuclear medium on the properties of hadrons. IPN Orsay is involved in the PANDA collaboration with the goal, in particular, of measuring the time-like electromagnetic form factors of the proton.

At extremely high temperatures and energies (several TeV), the ALICE experiments, following the NA50 and PHENIX experiments, studies the quark-gluon plasma.