Nuclear Physics Seminars

Although Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is the acclaimed theory of the strong interactions, important longstanding questions still remain to be answered on the nature of confinement of quarks and gluons inside the proton, and on their dynamical contribution to the proton's mass and spin. Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering (DVCS) and Exclusive Meson Production provide alternative tools to purely inclusive reactions that have significantly improved our studies of hadronic structure. By allowing for an additional momentum transfer "t" to the proton besides the large momentum transfered in the deep inelastic collision, one can in principle simultaneously access the longitudinal momentum fraction of the quarks and their position inside the proton, providing 3D "images" of quarks in hadrons. The price one pays for the rich phenomenology accessible through DVCS is a dramatic increase in complexity, due to the enlarged phase space one needs to cover. A new approach is being developed based on Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs), broadly related to Neural Networks, that allows for extensive parameter searches and enables the user to directly control the data selection procedure. Finally, among a wide range of recently studied implications, the SOMs models are connected to complexity theory, leading to the possibility of studying emergent behaviors in the system's properties.