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.

Second-year graduate student group members Sebastian Seeds and Provakar Datta are participating in the 2019 Hampton University Graduate Studies (HUGS) summer school at Jefferson Lab.

Organized annually since 1986, The Hampton University Graduate Studies (HUGS) Summer Program at Jefferson Lab is an internationally renowned summer school in Nuclear Physics designed to train the nuclear workforce’s next generation of researchers. More details of the 2019 program can be found here.

Dr. Eric Fuchey, current postdoc in the group, presented an invited talk at the 8th Workshop of the APS Topical Group on Hadronic Physics in Denver, CO. The subject of the talk was the Jefferson Lab experimental program on Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs).

The slides from the talk can be viewed at the following link:

EFuchey_GHP2019_final

The 2019 April Meeting of the American Physical Society was recently held in Denver, CO. Professor Puckett gave an invited talk at the meeting titled “Experimental Studies of Transverse Momentum Dependent Parton Distributions”.

The slides from the talk can be viewed at the following link:

Puckett_APS_April_2019

On Monday, March 11, 2019, Prof. Puckett delivered a colloquium at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN. The title of the talk was “Nucleon imaging at the femtoscale via elastic electron-nucleon scattering.” The main subject of the talk was the upcoming high-momentum-transfer nucleon form factor measurements using SBS in Hall A at Jefferson Lab.

The slides from the talk can be viewed here.

Congratulations to Dr. Richard F. (Freddy) Obrecht, who successfully defended his thesis, “Electric Form Factor of the Neutron From Asymmetry Measurements” on Friday, January 4, 2019.

Freddy analyzed the remaining unpublished measurement of the neutron electric form factor from experiment E02-013, that ran in Hall A in 2006, bringing it to a state of readiness for publication. He also independently re-analyzed the previously published results from the same experiment, and drafted the forthcoming archival publication for the whole experiment.

He is starting an Insight Data Science fellowship in NYC later this month, an intensive postdoctoral professional development fellowship designed to bridge the gap between academia and industry in data science. He will be missed by nuclear physics, but I know he will succeed in whatever he decides to do!

Freddy Obrecht, current Ph.D. student in the group, will defend his doctoral dissertation “Electric Form Factor of the Neutron from Asymmetry Measurements” on January 4, 2019 at 11 AM in room GW-121. Freddy has accepted an Insight Data Science fellowship starting in mid-January, 2019. The UConn calendar entry can be found here.

The GEp-III/GEp-2γ collaboration, with Professor Puckett as the lead author, drafted a paper describing technical aspects of the data analysis of both experiments, including the details of the final systematic uncertainty evaluation. The paper, published in Nuclear Instruments and Methods Section A, volume 910, pages 54-78 (2018),  was intended as a supplement to our recent archival publication, and as a reference for use by future experiments and/or data analyses using the same or similar equipment and methods.

Postdoctoral research associate Eric Fuchey is attending SPIN 2018, the 23rd International Spin Symposium, to be held Sept. 10-14, 2018 in Ferrara, Italy. Dr. Fuchey will present the proposal he is developing to study the DVCS process on the neutron using the low-energy “spectator proton tagging” technique in Hall A using the same beam time as the conditionally approved, “Tagged DIS” experiment. The abstract of the talk can be found here.

The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine have released their assessment of the science of the proposed future US-based polarized Electron-Ion-Collider. The report can be found here.

A joint statement from Jefferson Lab, Brookhaven National Lab, and the EIC Users’ Group can be found here.

The National Academies’ News Release can be found here.

From the press release:

“The National Academies were asked by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to examine the scientific importance of an EIC, as well as the international implications of building domestic EIC facility. The committee that conducted the study and wrote the report concluded that the science that could be addressed by an EIC is compelling and would provide long-elusive answers on the nature of matter. An EIC would allow scientists to investigate where quarks and gluons, the tiny particles that make up neutrons and protons, are located inside protons and neutrons, how they move, and how they interact together. While the famous Higgs mechanism explains the masses of the quarks, the most significant portion of the mass of a proton or neutron comes from its gluons and their interactions. Crucial questions that an EIC would answer include the origin of the mass of atomic nuclei, the origin of spin of neutrons and protons – a fundamental property that makes magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) possible, how gluons hold nuclei together, and whether emergent forms of matter made of dense gluons exist.”