NSF Award
2310076
This award supports one Virginia Union University (VUU) professor and students working with him in making important contributions to two high-impact measurements aimed at understanding the fundamental structure and dynamics of the neutron. The award will strengthen the research infrastructure available to VUU faculty in physics by outfitting a slow controls development facility that will be useful for subatomic physics and potential applications. Student development will be enhanced by the added availability of research opportunities and exposure to a world-leading research facility that hosts a multi-national group of experienced scientists and engineers, and these participants will gain training and experience in hardware and software that will be invaluable for their future STEM careers. This award is jointly supported by the Division of Physics and the HBCU-UP Program within the Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM. <br/><br/>The planned research contributes to the BONuS12 and TDIS experiments at Jefferson Lab, which enable the study of near-free neutron targets and seek to further refine the neutron structure function. Knowledge of the neutron structure function currently represents a gap in the community’s understanding, and affects neutrino scattering measurements. The proposed work contributes to the development of a slow controls system to monitor drift and target gas systems for the TDIS experiment. In a separate line of inquiry, the PI will collaborate on utilizing AI and published structure function data for a new F2A calculation. Work to this end has proven interesting to the subatomic physics community and this method will be complementary to the parameterizations that are presently available, in that it utilizes an artificial neural network that is trained to calculate this quantity, compared to interpolation/extrapolation from fitting routines.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
