Nuclear Physics Seminars This Term

This talk presents an exploration of meson structure studies using the Sullivan process, which provides valuable insights into the fundamental nature of hadrons within the framework of Quantum ChromoDynamics (QCD).  The primary focus is on pion and kaon structures, offering unique opportunities for enhancing understanding of the emergent hadron mass-generating mechanism (EHM) and Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs).

The KaonLT experiment, conducted in Hall C at Jefferson Lab (Jlab), employs a methodology comprising detector calibrations, efficiency studies, and offsets optimizations. These steps lead to the extraction of the kaon electroproduction cross section and the crucial separation of longitudinal and transverse components which, when warranted by the data, allow for kaon form factor extraction.

In addition to the Jlab efforts, ongoing research includes GEANT4 detector simulations to investigate the necessary requirements for measuring pion and kaon structure functions at the forthcoming Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). These investigations contribute significantly to constraining meson Parton Distribution Functions (PDFs) and validating the behavior of valence quark, sea quark, and gluon distributions.

"For a long time, it was believed that the fundamental constituents of atoms were electrons and nucleons until experiments conducted in the late 1960s at Standford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) proved the existence of internal degrees of freedom in the nucleons. These ones are called quarks and gluons, or collectively partons. With QCD as the fundamental theory for strong interactions, we can describe hadronic structure via correlators of partons giving rise to the so-called parton distribution functions (PDFs) and generalized parton distributions (GPDs) when the so-called collinear factorization applies. The non-elementary nature of hadrons makes these correlators perturbatively unsolvable so we can only measure or model them. 

This seminar will cover the discovery of the proton as a composite object through deep inelastic scattering (DIS), from both the experimental and theoretical sides. Modern experiments/theory on other processes such as deeply virtual, timelike and double deeply virtual Compton scattering (DVCS, TCS and DDVCS) will be covered too, giving a broad picture on the current access to parton distributions."

TBA