Provakar joined the group in 2018 as a Ph.D. thesis student. He got his bachelors and masters degrees in physics from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras respectively. In the first one and a half years after joining the group, Provakar worked on several simulation projects which helped with the preparation for the running of several Super BigBite Spectrometer (SBS) collaboration experiments, as well as the testing of photomultiplier tubes for the Ring Imaging Cherenkov Detector for SBS. Then in January 2021, after finishing all required classes in the Ph.D. program, he relocated to Virginia and got involved in hardware work at Jefferson Lab. Provakar took a lead role in the testing, commissioning and calibration of the electron calorimeter, A.K.A the BigBite Calorimeter or BBCAL, which is an integral part of the electron arm spectrometer that is going to be used in almost all SBS experiments, scheduled to run in Jefferson Lab’s Hall A. One of these several SBS experiments is E12-09-019, which aims to measure the neutron’s magnetic form factor, GMn, up to Q^2=13.6 GeV^2. The data taking of E12-09-019 was finished recently and, as a thesis student on E12-09-019, Provakar’s primary focus right now is leading the analysis of the data collected during the GMN run from Fall 2021-February 2022. Provakar defended his doctoral dissertation in September 2024 and will continue in the group as a postdoctoral research associate.
Anuruddha Rathnayake joined the group as a postdoctoral research associate in October 2024. Anuruddha completed his Ph.D. in 2024 with Professor Nilanga Liyanage at the University of Virginia (UVA), on the SBS measurement of the neutron magnetic form factor GMn at large Q2. Prior to his Ph.D. at UVA, Anuruddha completed his B.S. in physics at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka. Biosketch and photo forthcoming.