It was recently announced that Phoebe Sharp is one of the 2021/22 JSA/JLab Graduate Fellows. Phoebe won the award based both on her academic achievements and on the strength of her proposal, to use a real photon beam to probe short range correlations in nuclei. She is the first fellow from GW since 2017/18.
PANIC! It’s the Particles and Nuclei International Conference.
Our group was well represented at the 2021 edition of the Particles and Nuclei International Conference, which was held remotely after being originally planned to be held in Lisbon, Portugal. We had three contributions:
- Igor Strakovksy presented a poster, “Experimental tests of QCD scaling laws at large momentum transfer in exclusive light-meson photoproduction.”
- Giovanni Angelini presented a talk, “Understanding the large transverse momenta in SIDIS.”
- Axel Schmidt presented a talk, “Charged-averaged elastic lepton-proton scattering cross section results from OLYMPUS.”
The talks have been archived on YouTube, and you can watch below.
Dr. Angelini presents JLab TMD program at Sardinian Workshop on Spin
Dr. Angelini was an invited speaker at the recent Sardinian Workshop on Spin, presenting “TMD Studies at JLab: Present and Future.”
Giovanni Angelini defends his PhD Thesis!
Today, our group celebrates our newest doctor! Giovanni Angelini successfully defended his PhD thesis, titled “Probing Quark Dynamics in Semi-Inclusive Charged Pion Electroproduction with CLAS12.” This was an immensely impressive piece of work that charted both beam single-spin asymmetries as well as pion multiplicities over four-dimensional phase space. These results are some of the first to come from the CLAS collaboration after the 12 GeV upgrade, and are well on their way to publication. In fact, the π+ beam spin asymmetry results are already on the arXiv (arXiv:2101.03544 [hep-ex]) and are undergoing peer review.
We are also thrilled that Dr. Angelini has accepted a lecturer position in the physics department at American University! We wish both for his continued to success and that we’ll see him around town this fall.
Gabe Grauvogel named a 2021–22 “Luther Rice Fellow”
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.