Gabe Grauvogel has been awarded a Luther Rice Undergraduate Research Fellowship to support his summer research project, “Optimizing the Design of a Cherenkov Detector for a New Two-Photon Exchange Experiment.” He is one of twelve undergraduates to receive the award, and one of two from the GW Physics and Astronomy department.
New paper on the EMC Effect published in “Physical Review Research”
The EMC Effect is typically observed as a change in quark structure in a heavy nucleus relative to deuterium, one proton weakly bound to one neutron. But that doesn’t mean that the quarks in deuterium also don’t experience some change in their momentum distribution relative to an unbound proton and neutron. In a new paper titled, “Short-range correlations and the nuclear EMC effect in deuterium and helium-3,” Prof. Schmidt and collaborators calculate the size of this change when assuming that this modification depends on nucleon virtuality—roughly how fast the a nucleon is moving. Depending on the assumptions one makes about the structure of the free neutron, or about the dependence of the modification on the Bjorken-x variable, the results can be wildly different. One highly relevant application of the calculation is to make predictions for the BAND and LAD experiments, pictured above.
The paper appears in the April-June issue of journal Physical Review Research, vol. 3.