Nuclear Physics Seminars

"For a long time, it was believed that the fundamental constituents of atoms were electrons and nucleons until experiments conducted in the late 1960s at Standford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) proved the existence of internal degrees of freedom in the nucleons. These ones are called quarks and gluons, or collectively partons. With QCD as the fundamental theory for strong interactions, we can describe hadronic structure via correlators of partons giving rise to the so-called parton distribution functions (PDFs) and generalized parton distributions (GPDs) when the so-called collinear factorization applies. The non-elementary nature of hadrons makes these correlators perturbatively unsolvable so we can only measure or model them. 

This seminar will cover the discovery of the proton as a composite object through deep inelastic scattering (DIS), from both the experimental and theoretical sides. Modern experiments/theory on other processes such as deeply virtual, timelike and double deeply virtual Compton scattering (DVCS, TCS and DDVCS) will be covered too, giving a broad picture on the current access to parton distributions."