NSF Award
1507208
The neutrons and protons that make up the nucleus of every atom are themselves made up of constituent particles called quarks and gluons, and held together by what we call the strong nuclear force. This award supports research to the study of the strong interactions between those elementary constituents of matter. More specifically, it is aimed at understanding the properties of the theory of the strong force, named Quantum Chromodynamics or QCD, at energies where nucleons are formed and it is most relevant,. To this end, the PI and the students supported by this award will perform experiments at The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab,) in Newport News, VA. NSU faculty and undergraduate students will participate in the construction of hardware and in the analysis of data from experiments in the forefront of intermediate energy nuclear physics. Norfolk State University is one of the leading Historically Black Colleges and Universities. NSU graduates more African-American physics majors than all of the other Virginia universities combined. It is a goal of this project to strengthen the national participation of undergraduate minorities in nuclear and particle physics research.<br/><br/>In the recent years, numerical solutions of QCD (Lattice-QCD) have provided with a mass spectrum of light-mass mesons. Therefore, it is time for improving our experimental determination of the poorly known light-mass meson spectrum to compare with predictions. Since the interaction carrier of the strong interaction, the gluon, is sensitive to the strong interaction, it is also possible that gluons can be externally observable in the meson spectrum as exotic mesons (particles made of a quark, an antiquark and a gluon). One main question in meson spectroscopy is: Can we find hints of the gluon in the meson spectrum? The PI is analyzing data from meson spectroscopy experiments performed with the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS) in Jefferson Lab's Hall B to search for those hints. He is also involved in two new experiments named GlueX and CLAS12, at the Jefferson Lab 12 GeV upgrade. Partial Wave Analysis (PWA) is the technique used for that analysis. The first PWA results have been published and more PWA results are progressing in several channels. The main work is in developing and upgrading new techniques of amplitude and partial wave analysis.
