Professor Puckett and the graduate student and postdoc members of the group are at Jefferson Lab for the currently running “PREX-II” experiment in Hall A, ongoing detector assembly and cosmic ray commissioning work for the upcoming Super BigBite installation in Hall A, and for the SBS Collaboration Meeting on August 5-6. The PREX-II experiment is a precise measurement of the parity-violating asymmetry in low-Q2 elastic electron scattering from the 208Pb (Lead) nucleus. This measurement is highly sensitive to the “neutron skin thickness” of the lead nucleus, and constitutes a precise test of state-of-the-art nuclear theory and also has significant implications for the equation of state of neutron matter, relevant to the structure of neutron stars.
UConn graduate students Sebastian Seeds and Provakar Datta have been at JLab this summer assembling and cabling the detector package for the BigBite spectrometer, the main electron detector for the upcoming SBS family of experiments in Hall A, in preparation for cosmic ray testing and commissioning prior to installation in Hall A, currently scheduled for spring 2020.