  One of the key challenges for nuclear physics today is to understand from
first principles the effective interaction between hadrons with different quark
content. First successes have been achieved using techniques that solve the
dynamics of quarks and gluons on discrete space-time lattices. Experimentally,
the dynamics of the strong interaction have been studied by scattering hadrons
off each other. Such scattering experiments are difficult or impossible for
unstable hadrons and so high-quality measurements exist only for hadrons
containing up and down quarks. Here we demonstrate that measuring correlations
in the momentum space between hadron pairs produced in ultrarelativistic
proton-proton collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) provides a
precise method with which to obtain the missing information on the interaction
dynamics between any pair of unstable hadrons. Specifically, we discuss the
case of the interaction of baryons containing strange quarks (hyperons). We
demonstrate how, using precision measurements of p-omega baryon correlations,
the effect of the strong interaction for this hadron-hadron pair can be studied
with precision similar to, and compared with, predictions from lattice
calculations. The large number of hyperons identified in proton-proton
collisions at the LHC, together with an accurate modelling of the small
(approximately one femtometre) inter-particle distance and exact predictions
for the correlation functions, enables a detailed determination of the
short-range part of the nucleon-hyperon interaction.
